United to cut
Osaka flights
The daily Honolulu service
By Russ Lynch
will end in October,
the airline said
Star-BulletinUnited Airlines said today it will drop its daily Osaka-Honolulu service on Oct. 4, cutting its Japan-Hawaii service in half.
Joe Hopkins, a spokesman at United's headquarters in Chicago, said that even when flights are heavily loaded the service doesn't make money.
"We have been enduring heavy losses on that route for some years," Hopkins said. It is a leisure travel market, he said, that doesn't produce good yields at the best of times.
Japanese travel to Hawaii has slipped because of Japan's economic crisis, a slip in the buying power of the yen against the dollar and strong competition from other destinations.
Hopkins said United will keep its other Japan-Hawaii service, a daily Tokyo-Honolulu flight. Both routes use 400-passenger Boeing 747 jumbo jets.
No employees will be laid off because of the Osaka cancelation, he said.
United, still the biggest mainland-Hawaii carrier, has been expanding its Hawaii business from that direction.
Last month, for example, the airline resumed the direct Los Angeles-Kauai service that was dropped in 1993 after Hurricane Iniki.
United also recently boosted its Los Angeles-Maui service to three flights a day, from two.
Other airlines, such as Japan Airlines, Continental Airlines and Northwest, connect Japan and Hawaii and there are many flights a day bringing Japanese tourists to the islands. However, United's Osaka change means about 12,000 fewer seats a month.
The airline's parent, UAL Corp., today reported an 11 percent increase in second-quarter profits to $418 million, from $376 million a year earlier, on a 1.4 percent increase in revenues to $4.4 billion.
UAL said its Asia business was down but that drop was offset by a strong increase in U.S. demand and some effective cost cutting. Analysts say Asia produces about 20 percent of United's total business.
United also was helped by lower fuel prices.
