Northwest diverts passengers to Garuda
Northwest diverts passengers to Garuda
JAKARTA (JP): United States' Northwest Airlines has diverted most of its passengers routed Jakarta to Osaka to state-owned Garuda Indonesia.
An aviation dispute between Japan and the United States has stopped Northwest flying to Jakarta via Osaka, preventing it from becoming the first American airline to enter Indonesia in five years.
"We have diverted passengers to Garuda Indonesia. We will also take care of passengers planning to go to cities in the United States. So they don't have to worry about meals and accommodation," Northwest's regional managing director for Southeast Asia and greater China, James P. Reinnoldt, told The Jakarta Post here yesterday.
Northwest's first Indonesian service was to link Jakarta and Seattle, via Osaka, from July 3.
"There are 220 passengers who should be on board tomorrow from Jakarta and 90 passengers on Friday," Reinnoldt said.
He said that Northwest stopped ticket reservations on Saturday afternoon after learning there had been no new solution from the aviation talks between Japan and the United States.
"There would have been 2,000 or more passengers using Northwest on this route just in July," he said.
Of the 2,000 passengers, 70 percent would have been from the United States, 25 percent from Indonesia and 5 percent from Japan, he said.
"Osaka is one of Northwest's hubs. Passengers will be able to fly to Seattle, New York, Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles or Honolulu from the Japanese city," he said, adding that most airlines in Asia only fly to the West Coast.
From tomorrow, Northwest should have been the first U.S. airline to fly to Indonesia, with three services per week. The defunct PanAm airline stopped its Jakarta service almost five years ago. The route has remained vacant since.
Jakarta would have been the fourth Southeast Asian city served by Northwest. The airline already flies to Manila, Bangkok and Singapore.
Meanwhile, Garuda links Jakarta and Los Angeles, via Honolulu, five times a week.
Garuda flies to four Japanese cities: Nagoya, Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka.
A Garuda manager told the Post late yesterday that the airline had secured 115 passengers out of the 220 passengers diverted from Northwest's service tomorrow.
He said Garuda had secured 85 of the 90 passengers from Friday's service.
"We will try to accommodate all of the passengers," he said.
He said the flights to Osaka were originally from Denpasar, Bali, where a Northwest aircraft was due to leave at 11.15 p.m.. The service, using Boeing B-747-400s, would fly to Jakarta, where it would depart from Soekarno-Hatta airport at 0.35 a.m. the following day. (icn)