is this similar to the air asia incident when they sold tickets they hadn't got approval for and subsequently had to cancel everyone's flight because they couldn't get approval in time?
my understanding of the difference is that qantas got approved for the haneda service by australia's International Air Services Commission late last year but as Himeno pointed out on the website it still says the flight is pending approval - how does that work?? so they are selling flights without actually being able to guarantee they'll be able to fly the route? will that happen or is the rest of the process just a formality?
we got flights on QF26 planned in dec 2015 and would hate to lose them after getting all excited - these flights were through USDM as well - if the HND flight didn't get approved would things get messy for us?
thanks guys
Flights have to be approved by both ends (and any mid point stop overs if any). Australia and Japan have open skies and unlimited capacity between major cities in both counties,
except to HND which is limited to 7 return flights/week.
There are other rules that affect HND long haul flights, the main ones being no A380 operations between 0700 and 2200, Australia's long haul slots for HND between 2200 and 0700 and a requirement to maintain service to NRT if flying to HND (hence the BNE flight starting at the same time as the change to HND).
The flights have approval from IASC, they still need to be signed off by Japans MLIT. The BNE-NRT flight approval would just be a formality.
The things I'm concerned about with the HND flight are:
- Qantas intends to keep a 747 parked at HND all day as they do now at NRT, during peak time, at a small busy airport (4th busiest airport in the world by passengers) with limited parking spaces. HND has 3 hour limits for use of the parking bays (not sure if that is current, or was only during the construction of the international terminal extension).
- The current flight times at the HND end are within the night time long haul slot requirements, but they are seeking a departure at 2200. The 2200-2400 period is meant to be limited to arrivals (though that may have changed when the day time long haul slots were allocated last March - Australia didn't get any).
- Interpretations of the "must maintain NRT flights" have differed. Some airlines/counties take it to mean anywhere in that country to Tokyo (ie, Australia-NRT+Australia-HND [the current QF plan]), others take it as the same city (ie, SYD-NRT+SYD-HND).
I'm expecting that MLIT will ask for the flight times to be changed before they approve it.
If for some reason the HND flight isn't approved in time by everyone who needs to, QF would just keep operating QF21/22 SYD-NRT until it is.
