JAL finalizes departure

Japan Airlines will close its Saipan office at the end of this month, leaving at least 10 direct local employees without a job.

Although JAL ceased operating regular flights on Oct. 4, the airline’s Saipan office will remain open until Oct. 31 to serve the rest of its five special flights this month.

JAL operated charter flights on Oct. 16, 18, 21, and 23. The last service will be on Oct. 26.

Ricardo Manalo, passenger and traffic section manager for JAL-Saipan, said the airline would operate another special flight on Nov. 3 to bring tourists from Haneda to Saipan. The service is expected to arrive at 4am.

The 237-seater Boeing 767 aircraft would take no passengers on its way back to Japan. But it would come back on Nov. 6 to pick up the same passengers that it brought in three days earlier. The airplane will depart Saipan International Airport at 2:30am.

Manalo said JAL’s Guam station would facilitate this service. “Starting November, all JAL flights to Saipan would be operated out of Guam,” he said.

Currently, JAL directly employs 10 local and five Japanese personnel on Saipan, including station manager Shinichi Yoshida and reservation and passenger service manager Kunio Tomita.

Manalo said some of the employees would continue reporting for work until Oct. 31, while a few others would stop working on Oct. 27.

Asked about this career plans after JAL’s pullout, Manalo said he was not sure yet.

“I’ve been trying to find a job on island, but it’s difficult. A lot of people have been laid off and are looking for work. Now, I’m thinking of moving off-island, possibly to the states,” said Manalo.

He has been with JAL for 15 years, he said.

JAL used to provide Saipan daily DC10 flights from Narita and daily Boeing 767 flights from Kansai. The two flights had a combined capacity of 182,000 seats annually.

About 50 percent of the Japanese visiting the CNMI take JAL’s service.

Various studies have been conducted on the potential impact of JAL’s withdrawal from the CNMI, all forecasting huge economic losses and unemployment in the Commonwealth.

The Marianas Visitors Authority’s office in Japan said that, if JAL’s traffic is not replaced, Japan arrivals to the CNMI would drop from 400,000 to a maximum of 222,000 per year, even assuming that airlines would be flying with all seats occupied.

Economically, MVA said, JAL’s flight cancellations would result in a $36.7-million drop in government revenues and the loss of an estimated 2,550 jobs.

MVA also noted that travelers and agents were expected to experience extreme difficulty in securing seats to the CNMI, with demand for air seats far outstripping supply. This, in turn, could cause airfares to rise and make it impossible to market the booming educational travel and incentive markets, given the difficulty of securing large group blocks.

A separate study issued by the U.S.-based consulting firm Economists.com projected that JAL’s pullout could cause CNMI to lose as much as $216.2 million in economic output annually, if none of JAL’s airlift capacity is picked up by other carriers.

Economists.com also said that, if a third of JAL’s traffic is replaced by other carriers, the CNMI would suffer a decrease of about 103,910 passenger arrivals. This is expected to result in an economic output loss of about $144.1 million annually. About 1,700 jobs and about $24.5 million in personal income would be lost.

Northwest Airlines started nonstop flights between Osaka and Saipan this October, using a smaller aircraft than the one previously utilized by JAL for the same service.

Northwest’s flight has a capacity of 66,430 seats annually. This represents about 75 percent of the capacity of JAL’s old Osaka flight, or a little over one third of JAL’s Tokyo and Osaka flights combined.