![\"\"](\"http:\/\/chicagopressrelease.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/japan-airlines-300x200.jpg\" "\\"japan-airlines\\"")
American Airlines warned alliance partner Japan Airlines that it will face a lengthy and messy fight if it switches allegiance to Delta Air Lines and forms a close partnership to coordinate flying between the U.S. and Japan, as has been widely reported.<\/p>\n
Leading the opposition to a JAL-Delta tie-up: American Airlines. “We would object vigorously,” American CEO Gerard Arpey told analysts and reporters during an earnings conference call Wednesday. “It would be a very unwise course for them.”<\/p>\n
Texas-based American would lose a long-time partner in JAL, which links American’s passengers to a host of cities within Japan and northern Asia, and would find itself a bit player in the northern Pacific market. <\/span><\/p>\n American is still trying to gain antitrust immunity to share flying and revenues with British Airways across the Atlantic, an effort that has stretched over 13 years. Regulators have repeatedly questioned the competitive fall-out from allowing the two largest trans-Atlantic players to team up.<\/p>\n Although American expects to finally prevail in its cause, Arpey ridiculed the notion that Delta and JAL could quickly gain antitrust approval for a venture that would control about 60 percent of the market. “It would make a farce of the whole process,” he said.<\/p>\n Arpey insisted that JAL, which filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday, had not yet finalized a deal with Delta and its SkyTeam global marketing alliance, despite widespread reports to the contrary.<\/p>\n American continues to hold talks with the embattled Japanese carrier, which is laden with billions of dollars in debt, as well as its banks and Japanese government officials overseeing the airline’s bail-out efforts.<\/p>\n Losing JAL would cost American more than $100 million in annual revenues, officials said, at a time when it is trying to turn the corner after reporting heavy losses in 2009. AMR Corp. lost $344 million in the fourth quarter and nearly $1.5 billion for all of 2009 as traffic fell and many business travelers stayed home or bought cheaper tickets in the weak economy.<\/p>\n Excluding special items, including a tax gain, AMR said Wednesday it would have lost $415 million, or $1.25 per share, in the fourth quarter. Analysts, who usually exclude items from their calculations, expected a loss of $1.23 per share.<\/p>\n American officials insisted that they haven’t given up hope on retaining their current relationship with JAL, but noted their cause had been complicated as the airline and government officials have signaled that they are no longer interested in garnering foreign investment in the carrier.<\/p>\n American and its partners had offered to provide $2 billion in investment and other incentives to keep JAL in their OneWorld global alliance.<\/p>\n If the Japanese carrier defects to OneWorld, American will look to forge closer ties with other carriers in the region, officials said. When its longer-range Boeing 787s arrive in the next few years, American will have the option of ignoring Japan and focusing on emerging markets such as China.<\/p>\n If it loses, American is almost certain to reduce flights to Japan, potentially leaving Chicago consumers with less service to Asia’s largest market. American currently operates one daily non-stop from O’Hare to Tokyo’s Narita, as does JAL. The Japanese carrier would be likely to shift that service to one of Delta’s hubs, analysts said.<\/p>\n “The fact is our ability to serve Japan will be extremely limited,” Will Ris, American’s senior vice-president for government affairs, told the Tribune last month. “We have a significant number of passengers on our flights today who are connecting through Tokyo on Japan Airlines. We’ll lose a lot of passengers and therefore could not sustain the level of service that we provide today.”<\/p>\n AMR lost a total of $1.47 billion in 2009, or $4.99 per share, compared with a loss of $2.12 billion, or $8.16 per share, in 2008. Revenue tumbled 16.2 percent to $19.92 billion, as $3.85 billion in revenue vanished with slow demand for travel.<\/p>\n However, the second-largest U.S. carrier is starting to see signs of a rebound. Business travel was up during the fourth quarter, while the media frenzy over the “underwear bomber” on Dec. 25 didn’t prompt any appreciable drop in passenger bookings, executives said.<\/p>\n The Associated Press contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n jjohnsson@tribune.com<\/a><\/p>\n Read the original article from Tribune News Services<\/a>.<\/p>\n American Airlines warned alliance partner Japan Airlines that it will face a lengthy and messy fight if it switches allegiance to Delta Air Lines and forms a close partnership to coordinate flying between the U.S. and Japan, as has been widely reported. Leading the opposition to a JAL-Delta tie-up: American Airlines. “We would object vigorously,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/img><\/a>
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