Mesa Airlines Inc. has filed a federal lawsuit against a Honolulu man in an attempt to shut down a website critical of the company, its go! subsidiary and the labor policies of its CEO, Jonathan Ornstein.

The suit by the Arizona-based Mesa, filed January 24, 2007, in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, accuses Pearl City resident and Aloha Airlines pilot Mike Uslan with unfair competition, false representations, false advertising, trademark infringement and defamation. Also targeted by the suit are other as yet unnamed members of the group known as Hawai’i’s airline Employees Repelling Ornstein (HERO), along with any others responsible for the website, believed to include other employees of Hawaiian Airlines, Aloha Airlines or Hawaii Island Air.

The suit alleges Uslan and others ‘made literally false and misleading statements about Mesa Airlines with the intent to mislead’ consumers and steer them to other air carriers.

The suit also alleges that Uslan and HERO illegally used several corporate trade names, including ‘go!’ and ‘Mesa,’ in ‘metatags,’ bits of hidden code on a website used to direct Internet search engines to the anti-Mesa site.

The suit alleges these metatags were intended to ‘mislead Mesa Airlines’ customers and potential customers into visiting the website where they would be exposed to false, misleading and defamatory statements about Mesa Airlines.’

Uslan declined to comment on the advice of his attorney.

Attorney Jeffrey P. Miller, who represents Uslan, wrote in a letter filed in bankruptcy court that Mesa’s suit was intended ‘to harass him and cause him undue expense’ and accused the company of ‘using this lawsuit as a tool to discover information about the activities of HERO.’

Just two days after Mesa’s lawsuit was filed in Arizona, attorneys representing one of Mesa’s consultants, GCW Consulting, filed a motion in the ongoing Hawaiian Airlines bankruptcy proceedings demanding disclosure of any information held by Uslan about HERO and its website, including the group’s ‘organization, funding, management and operations.’

‘The transparent purpose of this discovery is to intimidate Uslan and others and to learn the identities of those associated with HERO for other litigation initiated by Mesa in the federal court in Arizona,’ Miller charged in a legal motion to shield Uslan and HERO from further forced disclosures.

Former Hawai’i Attorney General Robert Marks, an attorney for Mesa, said in a Feb. 23 letter that GCW took legal action ‘independently in pursuit of its own defense strategy’ but appeared to stop short of denying all links between the nearly simultaneous legal attacks on Uslan and HERO by Mesa and its consultant.

According to documents filed in Mesa’s lawsuit, the company first approached Domains by Proxy, Inc., listed as the registrant of the HERO website, and demanded the removal of metadata that included names of go!, Mesa or ‘the names of Mesa’s officers’ and the deletion of references to go! in tabs across the top of the page along with any links to Mesa’s corporate website.

After the site removed the infringing content,’ Mesa charged that it continued to include ‘numerous false and disparaging statements’ about the company and Ornstein.

Mesa then demanded Domains by Proxy immediately disclose the names and full contact information of the site’s owners. HERO has subsequently moved the site to an Internet hosting company in China to avoid disclosing information about its sponsors, the suit alleges.

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