“We are pleased to resume our connection with Nagoya. Before the pandemic we also flew this route. Finnair currently flies to Tokyo Haneda and Tokyo Narita, as well as to Osaka. In the summer season of 2024, we will have a total of 20 weekly flights to Japan,” Ole Orvér, Finnair’s commercial director, said in a statement.
In recent decades, Finnish society has focused on connections between Helsinki and northeast Asia, especially Japan. However, from 2020 onwards the company was faced with two global crises that significantly disrupted its own business model. First there was the pandemic that started in East Asia and lasted the longest there. Corona was still disappearing at the beginning of 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine took place. Russian airspace was largely closed in February/March 2022 and the situation remains the same.
From Northern Europe, the route across Russian Siberia was always the shortest to Japan and other countries in northeastern Asia. Finnair now uses two options, a spokesperson in Helsinki said when asked. One is in a straight line up over the North Pole; At Alaska a course must then be maintained to the south to avoid Russia, after which it heads west, across the date line to Japan.
The other, longer route is ‘underneath’, via the Middle East and China. “We look at the weather conditions for each flight and then determine the best route,” said the spokeswoman.
