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)