Just a bit of good news. Japan Airlines (JAL) finally emerges from bankruptcy protection today. JAL has procured 254.96 billion yen and made full repayment of the 395.15 billion rehabilitation debts. It will raise 12.7 billion yen through third party allotment of common shared but has no plans for additional financing right now.

Although it finally emerges from bankruptcy, the outlook is still cloudy due to the sharp drop in demand caused by the Tohoku Pacific Earthquake and the nuclear crisis. JAL saw 28% drop in domestic passengers and 25% drop in international ones. While ANA only saw 25% and 15% drop in domestic and international passengers respectively. JAL is hit way harder on international side than ANA :(

Sources:
Nikkei
Bloomberg

Japan Airlines (JAL) finally released the 2010 Golden Week (GW) traffic forecast (something I have been waiting for a while). In case you haven't heard of GW before, Japan has a 4 different national holidays from end of April till beginning of May every year, combining with weekend and that's the GW. This year there are 8 days of holiday from April 28 to May 5 (Geeze, I want to move to Japan just because of that LOL). So how is JAL doing during this one of the busiest travel periods in Japan? In a nutshell, JAL domestic flights are doing GREAT while international ones are doing okay too.

Frobes released its 2009 top 10 most on-time airlines a few weeks ago. Japan Airlines beats all of other carriers and scores the highest on-time percentage in 2009! Congratulations!

Japan Airlines has issued a press release regarding the traffic results of the 2010 New Year vacation period. There is a 8.9% improvement on international flight loads but a 2.1% decrease on the domestic one.

Japan Airlines has released its X'mas/New Year period traffic forecasts. Due to all the flight suspensions and capacity reductions, load factors will improve but total number of passengers will decrease. There will be 76 and 119 additional international and domestic flights respectively. Transpacific routes will see a 96.7% load. But my return flight doesn't see that full in business class. Does it mean we will see quite a number of op-ups :P For details of the forecasts, you can refer to JAL Press Release.

Japan Airlines has just released the traffic data for August 2009. Even the overall passenger numbers do drop year over year, the international passenger load factor actually improves due to the shift to smaller aircraft and route suspensions and frequency reductions.

According to Yomiuri News, Japan Airlines finally see a sign of "recovery".

In the month of September, the international passenger traffic increases by 5% compared to last September. Probably helped by the strong booking in the long holiday weekends in September. But the financial crisis began exactly a year ago and traffic in September 2008 dropped roughly 17%. So this 5% increase still doesn't bring business back to normal. Not to mention the yield probably is still much lower than before due to lower business class bookings (why do you think you can upgrade a transpacific flight with only 10,000 miles LOL). But this is at least a good sign, something JAL hasn't seen for quite some time. The passenger numbers have been decreasing for a long long time (since Dec 2007?).

Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation has published Narita traffic data for the week ending May 25 2009. It shows JAL remains the biggest airlines operating at NRT, by both capacity and frequency. JAL has 21.9% share of frequency and 20.5% share of seats at NRT, while ANA has 19% share of frequency and only 14.5% share seats.