Northwest Flies Supplies To Japan

A Northwest Airlines 747 left for Japan with more than 200,000 pounds of donated goods worth $2.5 million Sunday, the first U.S. relief flight since an earthquake rocked the Kobe area.

Doug Killian, director of international communications at Northwest headquarters in Eagan, Minn., said the jumbojet freighter was loaded with medical equipment, batteries, intravenous solution, sutures and sterile water in New York; disposable diapers, tents and sleeping bags in Chicago, and more than 100,000 pounds of canned soup, fruit juice and hypoallergenic glycerine soap at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

The plane left Seattle on Sunday morning to pick up another 40,000 pounds of goods in Tokyo before the final leg to Kansai International Airport near Osaka and Kobe.

The donated goods were gathered by AmeriCares, a private disaster relief group. Northwest provided the plane, and flight and ground crews donated their services, Killian said.

He said the cost to the company was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars but could give no figure.

Killian said it was the first relief flight to Japan from the United States and, as far as Northwest officials could determine, from anywhere in the world since the earthquake last Monday.

A State Department spokeswoman in Washington, Charity Dennis said Saturday the government agency knew nothing of the Northwest mission or any other relief flights.

Japanese Foreign Ministry offices dealing with the quake were closed for the weekend.

The airline has been flying be tween the United States and Japan since 1947 and has 132 employees who live in Japan. Some lost their homes, but none were injured in the quake, he said.

“We at Northwest decided shortly after we knew of the earthquake that we wanted to run a relief flight,” Killian said.

Northwest invited three or four relief groups to participate in the project, and AmeriCares was the first to respond, he added.

Additional donated supplies will be taken to Japan on regularly scheduled flights, and more special relief flights will be arranged as well, Killian said.

MEMO: Cut in The Region