THE JAPAN NEWS

 

The Yomiuri Shimbun

The transport ministry will allow Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to accommodate more foreign business jets, doubling the number of takeoffs and landings to up to 16 per day by the end of this month, it has been learned.

The Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry aims to attract more small aircraft, which are mainly used for business purposes as well as by affluent individuals overseas, so the measure can help increase the number of foreign visitors to this country.

Small planes are particularly useful for businesspeople in the United States and Europe, who like to use them to conduct negotiations while traveling.

Haneda Airport handled a total of 2,017 takeoffs and landings by foreign business jets in 2015, up 33.1 percent from the previous year, according to a preliminary ministry report. Haneda, which is close to central Tokyo, handled about three times more foreign traffic than Narita Airport in Chiba Prefecture.

 

Haneda has a limited number of slots for foreign business jets. The airport allocates 15 takeoffs and landings each per day to charter flights, airplanes for official purposes and other uses — of which only a maximum of eight are reserved for business jets.

Haneda also has a limit of four business jet landings a day, in a bid to avoid affecting scheduled flights.

But Haneda is planning to allocate unused slots for charter and other flights to business jets when it has only a handful of such flights, while also eliminating the cap for business jet landings. The airport will expand its parking apron and aim to boost its operation rates by cutting the parking period to five days from the current 10 days, according to officials.

Narita Airport completed a new parking apron in March, which is open for both scheduled flights and business jets. The airport already maintains a longer parking period than Haneda and will likely increase the number of parking aircraft, meaning greater convenience for foreign businesspeople visiting the Tokyo metropolitan area.

The government has been striving to host international conferences and attract affluent visitors like foreign investors, as part of its efforts to increase the annual number of foreign visitors to 40 million in 2020 when Tokyo hosts the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

At the end of March, Narita Airport started offering exclusive lanes at immigration for VIPs. Haneda is considering following suit.