The September 11th attack
Japan Airlines cutting Hawai'i flights 20 percent

By Susan Hooper
Advertiser Staff Writer

Japan Airlines is cutting more than 20 percent of its weekly flights to Hawai'i for October and November in response to a drop in passenger demand since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

A JAL spokesman said that between Sept. 16, when the airline resumed trans-Pacific service after the attacks, and Sept. 24, traffic on JAL's trans-Pacific flights dropped by more than 50 percent.

"In numerical terms, we had 114,000 passengers booked," Geoffrey Tudor, a JAL official in Tokyo, said yesterday. "That dropped to 55,000, (because) 59,000 canceled."

The airline is cutting 17 of its 75 total weekly flights. Its service on its Tokyo-Honolulu route will be cut from 24 to 14 flights a week, from today through Nov. 30, Tudor said. JAL will cut its

Osaka-Honolulu service from 14 to seven flights a week from Monday through Nov. 30, he said.

The daily flight between Tokyo and Kona is unaffected, Tudor said, as are schedules for flights to Honolulu from Sapporo, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Sendai, Hiroshima and Niigata.

"Hawai'i is so important for us, and this is a very tough call, but we hope for a recovery in demand as soon as possible," he said. "And we're still running in eight flights a day (from Japan to Hawai'i), which is a pretty substantial operation."

Flights between Japan and the U.S. Mainland have been cut from 67 to 50 a week for October and November, he said. The company has cut total trans-Pacific service 24 percent, from 142 to 108 flights a week.

Tudor said the current flight schedule between Japan and Hawai'i is sufficient to accommodate demand. He said the airline saw a "slight recovery" in bookings beginning about eight days after it resumed service after the attacks. "But it's still not back there where we want it to be, and I'm afraid it makes economic sense to do what we've done," he said.

Some flights could be restored if demand improves, Tudor said.

Tudor said he did not anticipate any layoffs of JAL employees in Hawai'i because of the flight cutbacks, because the carrier is still operating 58 flights a week to Honolulu and Kona.

A fall in demand, particularly on routes to the United States, has hurt Japan Airlines and other Asian carriers at a time when higher insurance premiums have raised costs. JAL's rival, All Nippon Airways Co., yesterday said it will reduce flights to Guam to seven a week from nine.

Bloomberg News Service contributed to this story.