Passengers on flights scheduled to land late at night at Fukuoka Airport have been taken aback as a strict curfew forced them to return to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, their point of departure. 

The situation has highlighted the difficulty in Japan, which has only a handful of 24-hour airports, to ensure passenger convenience while at the same time showing consideration to local residents bothered by aircraft noise.

Airline companies and a local government have set about working to address the inconvenience.

Japan Airlines Co.’s Flight 331 on Feb. 19, which was scheduled to fly from Haneda to Fukuoka Airport, began experiencing problems long before departure.

JAL officials said that failures were found around noon that day in a plane being used in another flight. JAL 331, which was to leave Haneda at 6:30 p.m., was scheduled to use the same airplane.

Arrangements for using a different plane and other developments delayed the departure to around 8 p.m., one and a half hours behind schedule. The plane was expected, at that point in time, to arrive at Fukuoka at 9:56 p.m.

The plane reached the skies over Fukuoka Airport just before the 10 p.m. final landing time. The airport, however, was backed up with planes waiting to land, and Flight 331 was told to wait for its turn.

The closing time passed while the plane was still circling in nearby skies.

With nowhere to go, Flight 331 chose to return to Haneda.

Kita-Kyushu Airport, also in the prefecture and only about 70 kilometers from Fukuoka Airport, allows planes to land around the clock. JAL, however, did not have arrangements at Kita-Kyushu for servicing a plane and arranging for accommodations and chauffeur services for its passengers.

JAL 331 stopped at Kansai Airport, in Osaka Prefecture, to refuel and returned to Haneda at 2:50 a.m. The 335 passengers on board stayed overnight at hotels arranged by JAL and elsewhere, and headed again for Fukuoka on a one-off flight on the morning of Feb. 20.

The strict curfew is set at Fukuoka Airport for a reason.

The airport is situated close to densely populated areas, as it lies only about two km from Hakata Station, the gateway to Fukuoka. In the past, a number of planes would land past 10 p.m. there, said officials of the transport ministry’s Fukuoka Airport Office.

As jet planes came to account for a larger portion of passenger aircraft in the 1960s and 1970s, however, aircraft noise emerged as a social issue, and residents of the hosting communities took their complaints to court.

The Supreme Court in 1994 ordered the central government to pay damages.

Partly owing to that development, parties including the central government continue to compensate residents for relocating out of noise-affected areas and cover the costs, among other things, for soundproofing their houses.

Planes are allowed to land on, and take off from, Fukuoka Airport’s runway only between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. The airport does not, in principle, allow late-arriving planes to land without prior approval if the delay was caused by “reasons ascribable to the airline,” which means they cannot be excused by bad weather or other circumstances.

Apart from JAL 331, six other planes landed at Fukuoka past 10 p.m. on the night, but they had all filed an application for a delay and obtained prior approval, according to Fukuoka International Airport Co. officials.

ONLY 6 24-HOUR AIRPORTS

The administrators of airports set their runway hours by taking into account the hosting communities.

Due to the scarcity of level ground in Japan, many of the nation’s 97 airports lie close to inhabited areas and therefore typically have a closing time. Runways operate 24 hours a day at only six of them, including Haneda, Chubu and New Chitose.

The runway hours at Osaka Airport, also known as Itami Airport, last from 7 a.m. through 9 p.m.

The airport, which faced a number of lawsuits over noise pollution, is known for its “particularly rigorous curfew,” which is obliging many planes to divert to nearby Kansai Airport, an aviation industry insider said.

Narita Airport, outside Tokyo, also has limited runway hours, although the closing time was extended in 2019 from 11 p.m. to midnight for one of its two runways.

Construction of Narita Airport faced a vehement opposition campaign. It has therefore been taken for granted, since the airport opened, that no planes should be flying over it late at night.

Narita, however, has been facing increasingly intense competition in recent years from other airports, including Haneda Airport, which is increasingly going more international oriented. 

Narita International Airport Corp. held more than 200 meetings with local residents when a decision was made to extend the closing time, officials said.

Fukuoka Airport had turned away two planes in January, of All Nippon Airways Co. and Skymark Airlines Inc., respectively, back to Haneda Airport after the aircraft failed to be in time for the curfew.

Seitaro Hattori, the governor of Fukuoka Prefecture who took the situation seriously, told a news conference on March 28 that he would set up a study group with concerned businesses so it will be easier in the future to divert the point of landing to Kita-Kyushu Airport.

JAL also plans to develop arrangements at Kita-Kyushu for accepting diverted flights, officials said.

A prefectural government official said, however, that extending Fukuoka’s runway hours is “not realistic because doing so would place more of a burden on residents.”

“The runway hours were set on the basis of long-established trust between airport officials and the hosting communities,” a senior transport ministry official said. “That is the fruit of so many years of talks.”

“Airline companies would have to enforce a convention, for example, that would stop a plane from taking off in the first place if it will be late for the time set by counting backward from the anticipated arrival time,” aviation critic Hiroshi Sugie said.

(This article was written by Eishi Kado and Yusuke Ogawa.)