Peach Aviation begins its first flight from Okinawa

Peach Aviation begins its first flight from Okinawa

On October 18, at Naha Airport, Peach Aviation began its Kansai-Naha route.


October 19, 2012 Ryukyu Shimpo

On October 18, Peach Aviation, a low-cost company (LCC) related to All Nippon Airways (ANA), based at Kansai Airport, began a Kansai-Naha route. The terminal for LCC established within the ANA cargo terminal at Naha Airport also officially started. It is a one-story building with about 3000 square meters of floor space. A total of three LCC companies: Peach Aviation, AirAsia Japan and Jetstar Japan currently use Naha Airport.

Peach uses the 180-seater Airbus A320 as their main airplane. Fares range between 4590 yen and 14790 yen one-way from Kansai Airport to Naha Airport (tax included). On the first day, the aircraft operated at 89% of seating capacity on the flights departing from Kansai to Naha, and 72% from Naha to Kansai.

They aim to increase the number of passengers on the Kansai-Naha route to 300000 in 2013 and to run at 75% of seating capacity. Peach currently operates two round-trip flights a day, but will change this to three round-trip flights per day between January 21 and March 30, 2013. They will consider increasing the number of flights depending on demand in the future.

Shinichi Inoue, the head of Peach Aviation, held a press conference at the LCC terminal in which he stated, “We will offer cheaper fights so that students and people from Okinawa living in Kansai can return to Okinawa easily. Using new aircraft for all flights, we will run these flights safely.” With regard to future plans, he said that he would like to transport many tourists to Okinawa rather than to resorts in foreign countries. Also he mentioned that in the 2013 fiscal year, they plan to start domestic and international flights from Okinawa as their second base of operations.

They have been operating with five airplanes but will increase that to ten airplanes by August 2013.

(English translation by T&CT, Lima Tokumori and Mark Ealey)

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