ANA to end scheduled charter operation with NCA

ANA Cargo has revealed it is ending its scheduled charter operation partnership with Nippon Cargo Airlines (NCA) after just over three years.
The Japanese airline recently revealed that it would cut the number of cargo and passenger flights it offers in the second half of the year because of a downturn in demand.
As part of this re-organisation, from October 30 it will end its charter partnership with NCA on flights between Okinawa and Narita.
The six roundtrip flights have been provided by NCA since July 2013, utilising three Boeing 474-400 freighters.
While ANA has decided to continue to operate the service, it will now operate the flights one way – from Okinawa to Narita − and it is likely that the airline will use smaller aircraft as its fleet consists of 12 B767-300 freighter aircraft, which have a payload of around 58 tonnes, compared to the B747’s 112 tonnes.
However, it will increase the number of flights on the route to seven per week.
When news first broke that the airline planned to reduce its cargo services, Japanese news service Nikkei estimated that the overall cuts amounted to a 15% reduction in cargo capacity.
Its daily flight between Singapore and Narita and six times daily flight between Narita and Nagoya also face the chop, while frequencies on another four flights are being reduced.
In contrast, another three flights are having their frequencies increased.
There are also some new services being added: Six round trip flights per week will be introduced between Narita-Guangzhou, Guangzhou-Okinawa, and Kansai-Nagoya.
In its first quarter results, ending June 30, the airline said domestic cargo revenues had declined by 1.5% year on year to Y7.1bn and international cargo revenues were 29.1% behind the previous year at Y20.4bn.
The decline in international revenues came despite an 18.4% improvement in demand to 980m ton km.
It said its domestic cargo business had suffered from a reduction in the volume of fresh produce originating in Hokkaido, while international revenues were affected by the appreciation of the yen, declining unit prices because of overcapacity – principally on flights departing from China – and a change of agency commission settlement scheme.
Traffic on international services increased because ANA captured demand from China and other Asian destinations to North America via Japan as well as intra-Asia demand.