On July 16, JAL held a ceremony at Narita Airport to commemorate the 60th anniversary of its Tokyo-Jakarta route.
The company’s Indonesia-Jakarta route was launched on July 16, 1962 as an extension of the then Haneda-Singapore route (via Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore), using a Convair 880-22M aircraft and operating three flights per week. It was later transferred to its current location at Narita and began nonstop service on the Narita-Jakarta route on November 1, 1992; in July 2015, it introduced a Boeing 787-9 aircraft, and in October 2018, it began code-sharing service with AIR Gharda Indonesia.
Mr. Shinichiro Shimizu, Representative Director and Executive Vice President of JAL, took the stage at the ceremony in front of Gate 62 of Terminal 1, saying, “This year marks 65 years since Japan and Indonesia established diplomatic relations. As you all know well, Indonesia has magnificent nature and numerous cultural heritage sites, and I am sure that everyone departing today will have a wonderful time for work and sightseeing. He also expressed his gratitude for 60 years of service, saying, “I hope everyone departing today will have a wonderful time for work and sightseeing.
Mr. Shimizu also discussed the situation following the recent relaxation of waterfront measures, citing the increase in the number of technical trainees from Indonesia to Japan and the return of business use from Japan visiting the region on business trips, with approximately 500,000 people each coming and going between the two countries by 2019, approaching the scale of 1 million people in total He recalled that by 2019, there would be about 500,000 people traveling between the two countries, bringing the total to nearly one million. The airlines play an important role in getting to know each other’s countries,” he said. We are operating 12 flights a week, and we would like to contribute even more,” he said, adding that although the Corona disaster is still in the works, he is looking forward to easing the waterfront in order to further increase traffic in the future.
The aircraft was a 186-seat Boeing 787-8, and in addition to a speech by Captain Yoshitaka Murase, a calligraphy performance by CA Shizuka Takahashi, who is also a calligrapher, and a Balinese dance performance by a gamelan player, all of which added to the commemorative ceremony.
© Source travel watch