Over a hundred domestic flights connecting local airports and Tokyo's Haneda airport were canceled on Thursday, the first workday of the New Year, following a collision between a Japan Coast Guard plane and a Japan Airlines jetliner, leaving passengers stranded at some Japanese airports.
A JAL official said the carrier had canceled more than 60 domestic flights to and from Haneda, affecting about 13,000 people, two days after the accident occurred on a runway at Japan's busiest airport.
All Nippon Airways said it had canceled more than 90 domestic flights to and from the airport that affected some 21,300 people, after the runway where the collision occurred remained closed Thursday.
At New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido, around 200 passengers were stuck overnight, according to an airport operator source, after another group of 256 passengers were stranded from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning due to flight cancelations caused by the collision.
New Chitose's operator Hokkaido Airports Co. has been providing support to passengers, including by distributing mats and sleeping bags, since Tuesday night.
The airport, which handles about 400 daily arrivals and departures, had around a quarter of their flights bound for Haneda.
New Chitose experienced a high number of cancellations, particularly for Haneda-bound flights, with 45 canceled on Tuesday and 28 on Wednesday.
On Thursday, 18 flights to Haneda and some other airports from New Chitose are expected to be canceled.
Ikuro Narayama, a 27-year-old company employee from Tokyo, said his flight to Haneda scheduled for Wednesday was canceled, adding that he had to spend the night in the Hokkaido airport's rest area.
"I have had to change my schedule and it's costing me a lot of money," Narayama said, adding that he is going to travel to the northeastern city of Sendai by plane on Friday and then take the Shinkansen home.
The aftermath of the collision also caused flight delays from Haneda to New Chitose. Some flights were so delayed that they did not arrive there until 3 a.m. on Thursday.
The coast guard aircraft and the JAL plane collided at Haneda airport Tuesday, causing both aircraft to catch fire and killing five coast guard members, while all 379 on board the commercial flight escaped without life-threatening injuries.
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