The opening of the world's first offshore airport at Kansai in September 1994 was more important for ANA than for any other carrier. With Tokyo Narita having reached capacity, quite simply, without Kansai, ANA had nowhere else from which to grow.
Even Kansai's predecessor, serving Osaka and the surrounding Kansai region - Itami Airport - was saturated. The coming of this remarkable new airport on its man-made island brings the airline two critical opportunities: the chance to open international services from Osaka; and convenient feeder connections to its domestic network. Highly commercialised Osaka and the Kansai region constitute an important destination in their own right, with a population of some 20 million, an astonishing gross annual product of $570 billion and numerous cultural attractions.
As Osaka traffic grows, ANA is anxious to build on the 25% domestic, and 15% international, market shares which it secured at Itami. By its 1995 summer season, it aims to have 35 domestic and some 40 international flights from Kansai each day. Deputy general manager of ANA's Kansai Airport office, Hiroyasu Oku, explains that the international services will be to South-East Asia and Australia, leaving the carrier's North American and European services at Narita - for now at least.
Despite the benefits of the new airport, the story of Japanese airport congestion has a long way left to go. Some crucial elements may be put in place in the nation's seventh five-year airport plan due out this year. The airport is theoretically a 24h operation with an ostensible capacity of 160,000 movements a year. In practice, explains Oku, air-traffic-control restrictions - notoriously conservative in Japan - limit capacity to some 120,000 movements a year. Indeed, at peak times, the single-runway operation is already capacity-limited. The original plan called for a second runway in 2000, but the Japanese recession, has forced that date back to 2006/7, when the airport is-forecast-to become saturated.
"We will have to go to early-morning or late-night flights if we want to expand more," says Oku. The 24h availability makes that a possibility, but, in reality, things are not so simple. The airport is used for passengers only from 06.30 to 22.00 and the rail-bus and boat connections to the island operate only to meet those schedules. Later or earlier flights would need someone to pay to run the surface connections and various operational functions, which now shut when not required. Any incremental growth, found that way, can only be expensive to achieve. Oku suggests that, in any case, demand would be minimal for either domestic or international travel at inconvenient hours.
Meanwhile, Kansai's parent company is cheerfully capitalising on the situation with ferocious user-fees. A rebellion by airlines eventually brought the operating fees in line with the already high levels of Narita. Oku points out, however, that rental fees for airline offices, check-ins, gates and so on remain "very expensive", which means that "the profits to airlines using Kansai decrease" compared with services to other airports.
One way in which ANA may soften the operating costs is through its maintenance operation. Of ANA, JAL and JAS, only ANA is following through, on stated intentions to build major-maintenance hangars at Kansai. The others' plans fell victim to financial difficulties and it may now be that ANA will secure good third-party business from the 15 airlines, which it already handles at Kansai, and through new relationships.
Source: Flight International
