There’s More To Do Before Nashville Airport Snags A Direct Flight To Tokyo

A Boeing 787 flies in San Francisco. Japan Airlines is one of several to offer direct flights to Tokyo, in a total of about a dozen U.S. cities. Credit: iflyfsx via Flickr

Both Nashville Airport officials and the CEO of Bridgestone have expressed interest in a nonstop flight to Tokyo, but there’s a lot of negotiation that goes on behind the scenes first — between the airport, airline, local government, business leaders and other community groups.

So what are the odds that Nashville International Airport will get a direct flight to Japan?

“Ten years ago, you’d be better off getting a lottery ticket,” said Robert Mann Jr., an airlines analyst based in New York.

It wasn’t because of Nashville in particular, but because of its size. Back then, he says, airplanes flying overseas were huge, largely to accommodate the fuel load it took to fly long distances, and had to be filled with hundreds of passengers. But Japan Airlines, for example, now flies a Boeing 787. It’s much more fuel-efficient and has only 186 seats — meaning smaller markets can fill it.

Nashville Airport currently has 180 passengers taking connecting flights to Asia every day, says Trudy Carson, director of air service development. That means the demand for a daily flight is almost there.

Carson, who describes her job as a matchmaker between businesses and the airlines, says Nashville still needs to grow those numbers — in case some passengers have a loyalty program with a different airline, or they don’t like the flight time.

It helps that Tennessee has a strong Japanese business presence, Mann says, because airlines know business fliers tend to pay more. But he says it’s not enough for a route from Nashville to be profitable: It has to be profitable enough to justify forgoing routes elsewhere.

“Nashville is competing with probably a score of other cities who desperately want this sort of service,” he says.

The discussion period is a slow process, as is the implementation. Even if an airline created a nonstop route to Tokyo tomorrow, it would still be about another year before the first plane took off, Carson says.

“Right now, [airlines] are already planning for next fall’s schedule,” she says.