At the end of March, All Nippon Airways will drop its daily service to Honolulu from the Kansai International Airport at Osaka. United resumes
Okasa-Honolulu
flights in March
By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.comThe move cuts its Hawaii service in half, to just one flight a day from Tokyo's Narita International Airport. But seats on the Osaka-Honolulu route will actually increase because United Airlines will take over the non-stop run with bigger aircraft that ANA's.
The ANA service, run by a subsidiary called Air Japan, uses Boeing 767-300ER aircraft with 218 seats, said Tom Fredo, an ANA spokesman in New York. "United will use the Boeing 717-200. It's a larger aircraft, with 275 seats," he said.
That means about 400 more Osaka-Honolulu seats a week.
ANA's last Osaka-Honolulu flight will leave Kansai March 29 and United will begin the service March 30, Fredo said. "The seats will be jointly sold by United Airlines and ANA," under a code-sharing agreement, Fredo said. United and ANA have had a code-sharing agreement since 1998. Such agreements allow each airline to use its own ticketing and flight numbers even when the plane carrying the passengers belongs to the partner.
United is attempting to slash its operating costs after filing for bankruptcy protection on Dec. 9. The airline used to have an Osaka-Honolulu run but dropped it in the fall of 1998.
United's aircraft currently sit idle on the tarmac at Kansai every night after landing from San Francisco. Under the new agreement, those planes will fly the Honolulu route, an ANA statement said.
ANA will suspend the use of its own aircraft and instead allocate them to its Osaka-Shanghai route, where it plans to double the number of flights, it said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
