Saturday, February 15, 2014

Heavy snowfall in Tokyo disrupts flights all over Japan again.

From the afternoon of February 14th until the next morning, Tokyo received its second heavy snowfall in a week, two weekends in a row, virtually closing down the capital's Haneda Airport (HND/RJTT) again.

For domestic flights, All Nippon Airways (NH/ANA) canceled 40 and Japan Airlines (JL/JAL) canceled 75 on February 14th, affecting 5,300 and 11,575 customers, respectively. On the following day today, in the morning ANA had already decided to cancel 245 domestic flights and five of Haneda's international flights, affecting 49,140 passengers, while JAL decided to cancel 280 domestic flights and a Haneda - Shanghai/Hongqiao (SHA/ZSSS) round-trip, affecting 42,541 travelers. Skymark Airlines (BC/SKY), Star Flyer (7G/SFJ), and AIRDO (HD/ADO) (d.b.a. Air Do) all warned passengers to check the latest departure information.

Again, Kanto, or the Greater Tokyo region, is not used to snow. 24-hour stand-by snow plowing, practiced in snowy Aomori and Hokkaido, is too costly to be justified for a large airport like Haneda that usually only gets once or twice of trivial snow accumulation in a year.

Source: Aviation Wire, February 15th. (in Japanese)

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