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ational flag carrier Garuda Indonesia hopes to reopen flights to the US starting next summer, following a recent upgrade by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

It is looking to re-establish flights to the US with a stopover in Narita International Airport in Tokyo, which is considered an ideal transit point for the US market.

The state firm revealed the plan following the FAA’s recent decision to upgrade the safety status of Indonesian airlines to category 1, allowing them to fly to the US after an eight-year ban.

The upgrade was announced after the EU decided last year to lift a ban on four Indonesian carriers, including Garuda, from traveling to Europe.

Garuda Indonesia president director Arif Wibowo said it would first hold talks with US-based Delta Airlines regarding their existing partnership. The two firms, members of global airline alliance SkyTeam, have a codeshare partnership that allows them to share flights.

At present, the collaboration enables Garuda passengers wanting to travel to the US be “delivered” to Tokyo Haneda Airport and then flown by Delta to Los Angeles and Seattle.

“We need to make a bilateral agreement with Delta Airlines, so that it can translocate its operations from Narita to Haneda airport. Hopefully by then Garuda can serve the Narita-Los Angeles route [by itself],” he said on the sidelines of the Indonesia Business and Development (IBD) Expo in Jakarta on Thursday.

He said Delta had so far only offered a flight to Los Angeles via Chubu Centrair International Airport in the industrial city of Nagoya, adding that Garuda would need more time to negotiate
with Delta.

If all goes well, Garuda plans to serve at least 400,000 passengers on the route annually, using its Boeing 777 aircraft with three flights per week. It expects to officially launch the flight by the end of the second quarter of next year.

Data from publicly listed Garuda show that it flew to 18 international destinations on 35 international routes by the end of June.

Its European market grew the highest in terms of available seat kilometers (ASK) at 70.7 percent year-on-year (yoy) in the first half, followed by the Middle Eastern market with 40.5 percent yoy and the Chinese market with 38.5 percent yoy.

The number of international passengers stood at 2.11 million in the first six months, down slightly from 2.2 million a year ago.

However, Garuda managed to increase the freight it carried on its international flights as cargo volume rose to 44,234 tons from January to June, an increase from 36,660 tons during the same period in 2015.

Meanwhile, the Transportation Ministry’s director of aircraft operations and airworthiness Mohammad Alwi said the safety status improvement would restore global trust in Indonesian airlines and aircraft industry.

He, however, acknowledged that the government needed to be consistent in maintaining the safety standards to uphold the achievement.

In 2007, International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) audits revealed 121 loopholes in the Indonesian air safety oversight system, which partly led the FAA and the EU to downgrade the safety status and banned Indonesian airlines from flying to the US and Europe. (vps)