BA has resumed normal services to Tokyo after new parent IAG chief executive Willie Walsh flew out to the country in person to see for himself the impact of the continuing nuclear emergency following last month’s earthquake.
Walsh said the situation in the Japanese capital appeared totally normal and that on his visit he was stopped in the street to be thanked by people for visiting the country which was hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami that was estimated to have killed more than 20,000 people on March 11.
BA had been operating shuttle services from Heathrow up until Thursday last week to allow its crew not to stay in Tokyo, that was feared could be hit by radioactive contamination from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, damage by the quake and tsunami.
“I’ve always felt you cannnot ask people to do something you are not prepared to do yourself,” Walsh told Travel Weekly about his trip to Tokyo. “I was so impressed with the way they [the Japanese] have just responded to it.
“Tokyo was absolutely normal. There is no sign of damage, the shops were open, the resaurants full, I could get anything I wanted, I could drink the water.
“I wanted to see it for myself. We do a lot of business in Japan and over the years we raised a lot of financing through the Japanese banks. I wanted to show my confidence in what we were doing.”
Walsh’s decision to go to Japan in person comes nearly a year after he opted to get in a BA aircraft during last year’s Icelandic ash cloud crisis to prove it was safe to fly.
He said he remains convinced it was always safe to fly during a week of UK airspace closures estimated to have cost the aviation industry 2 billion euros.
“I look back now and it was very frustrating,” he said. “I still firmly believe there was no need to shut the skies. It was very frustrating to get that five days of total closure for a risk that was negligible if anything at all.”
Asked how he thought the response might differ today, he added: “We would her a more reasoned response. A lot of people did not really understand what the risk was, we got a knee jerk reaction. It was probably a combination of fear and a lack of understanding as to what the real risk was. The fear led to a reaction that was unnecessary.
“I genuinely believe it would have been absolutely safe for airlines to fly right throughout that period.”