fly commercial to Japan<\/a>\u00a0after the Defence Force 757 clapped out in Papua New Guinea on Sunday after two fuses blew while refuelling.<\/p>\nThat meant leaving behind 52 people who were travelling with him.<\/p>\n
But as luck would have it Air New Zealand chief executive Greg Foran was one of them and he told\u00a0Checkpoint<\/i>\u00a0they were able to thumb a ride for the group by diverting a flight to Japan through Brisbane.<\/p>\n
“Things were pretty grim yesterday afternoon, as you can imagine as things unfolded.”<\/p>\n
But one of the options was to check on the availability of seats on an Air New Zealand flight to Narita.<\/p>\n
“One of the options that we looked at was to make a quick call back and say, well just how many seats do we have on this flight tomorrow.<\/p>\n
“With a bit of luck, it did actually work out just about perfectly. So we’ve got a very full plane now.”<\/p>\n
Passengers already on the flight experienced about a two-hour delay due to the the Brisbane detour, said Foran.<\/p>\n
“I’m forever grateful, that hopefully they’re going to be OK with that. I’ll be on that plane in a few minutes and I’ll make sure that I personally go around and thank them all and do my job on making sure that we look after them.”<\/p>\n
He did not know how much all of this would cost, he said.<\/p>\n
“At the end of the day, we’ve actually been flat out … just doing the logistics.”<\/p>\n
Trip worth it to promote tourism<\/h3>\n
Foran believed it was still worth going to Japan despite arriving nearly a day later than planned.<\/p>\n
It was a “really great tourist market” for Air New Zealand, he said.<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of Kiwis heading out to Japan and we’re putting on a bigger gauge flight, a 777 will start running on that particular route and that’s got another 40 or 50 seats on it, so over the season that’s another 30,000 seats.<\/p>\n
“So we’re very keen to get out there and promote Japan as a tourist destination and interestingly, it’s been a massive … inbound market for us over the years.”<\/p>\n
Foran said that had not rebounded after Covid so this was a chance to get more Japanese visitors to New Zealand.<\/p>\n
When asked whether Air New Zealand had the capacity for charter flights for Luxon due to Defence Force plane troubles, Foran’s response was, “It depends”.<\/p>\n
He said while this time they could accommodate everyone, it was also the slowest point of the season.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes it could be leasing a plane for a period and other times it could be just using a flight that’s already going.”<\/p>\n
VIA RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The boss of Air New Zealand says he’ll spend a flight to Japan personally apologising to passengers for the inconvenience of diverting to pick up a trade delegation stranded after the Prime Minister’s plane broke down. Otherwise his seat is at the back of the plane – row 66 right next to the loo. Prime […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":5780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10355,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10354\/revisions\/10355"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}