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AL president: Japan Airlines "reserves the right to sue the government"
Almasalla Travel News – TOKYO, Japan – Japan Airlines (JAL) reserves the right to sue the government for favouring rival ANA Holdings in allocating landing slots, its president said, raising the prospect of an unprecedented battle that could batter the nation’s airline industry.
Asking a court to force the government to review its recent allocation would be a rare step for a Japanese company, especially from one that enjoyed cozy ties with politicians and regulators but has fallen out of favour of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s one-year-old administration.“It’s one of the steps we might take in the future,” JAL president Yoshiharu Ueki said, when asked if legal action was one possibility.
Ueki said his company had asked the government to give a satisfactory explanation for the landing-rights handout, which saw Japan’s biggest airline ANA receive more than twice as many of the prized international slots at Haneda airport, the world’s fourth busiest hub.
JAL is Japan’s second-biggest airline by revenue and fleet size.
The government, which had previously divided slots equally between the two airlines, is expected to respond to JAL as soon as Friday, but Ueki said he was extremely dissatisfied with the process so far.
“There are times when you will take actions because you are trying to achieve a particular result, and sometimes you will take actions even knowing that you might not be able to get a particular result,” Ueki said. “Sometimes things have to be said, sometimes things have to be done,” he said.
In what became a politically charged battle over the landing rights at the Tokyo hub, Japan’s aviation regulators on October 2 awarded JAL five new Haneda slots compared with 11 for ANA.
Source: financialexpress.com
