Airlines hasten flights to Tokyo

Even as airlines added extra flights to get people out of Tokyo, their long-term plans for expansion there have been thrown into doubt.

Delta Air Lines Inc. said on Thursday that it will suspend new flights to Tokyo’s Haneda airport beginning next week. Singapore Airlines has postponed plans for later this month to put the massive Airbus A380 on a flight from Singapore to Tokyo to Los Angeles currently served by a Boeing 747. The A380 has 96 more seats.

With parts of the country devastated by natural disasters, and a leaking nuclear plant, the airlines are scrambling as more people try to leave Japan while many others reassess plans to fly in.

“The natural disaster in Japan has left us all in deep shock,” Lufthansa Chief Executive Christoph Franz said on Thursday. His airline has rerouted all Tokyo flights to Osaka and Nagoya instead.

United Continental Holdings Inc., the biggest U.S. carrier to Asia, isn’t cutting flights but is monitoring the situation. Both United and Delta use Tokyo’s Narita airport as a hub for flights farther into Asia.

Airlines had planned to increase U.S.-Japan flying by 10.2 percent next month compared with April 2010, according to Barclays Capital. AMR Corp.’s American Airlines and Delta would have the biggest percentage increases. Both airlines just started flights to Tokyo Haneda airport earlier this year.

United Continental operates an average of 26 flights a day from Japan, both to the U.S. and to other cities in Asia. Delta has 40 flights on its busiest days. American has six flights a day from Japan to the U.S.

Pacific flying is more than 11 percent of Delta’s capacity and almost 15 percent for the combined United and Continental.

Delta said it would “temporarily suspend” its daily flight to Haneda from Los Angeles beginning Wednesday, and one from Detroit beginning Thursday. It said it can reinstate the flights on short notice.

“Anxiety about possible escalation of the nuclear crisis and simply a fear of the unknown is driving behavior right now,” said Andrew Herdman, director-general of the Kuala Lumpur-based Association of Asia Pacific Airlines.

Other airlines kept their growth plans in place. Hawaiian Airlines, which just won permission to fly from Honolulu to Tokyo Haneda, is keeping that flight and adding a new flight to Osaka in July, spokesman Keoni Wagner said.

In the short run, more planes are going to Japan. Several Asian carriers added flights as more governments urged their citizens to leave. U.S. carriers, however, kept their schedules unchanged.