Japan Airlines to Eliminate 170 More Jobs This Month

Japan Airlines Corp., restructuring under bankruptcy protection, will eliminate 170 more jobs this month under a plan to slash the workforce by a third by March as it reduces operations.

JAL needs to eliminate 1,500 more employees to meet the goal of trimming 16,000 positions, President Masaru Onishi told reporters in Tokyo today.

The carrier is eliminating 49 routes and cutting 103 aircraft after filing for Japan’s fourth-largest bankruptcy in January. Operating profit was 13 billion yen in November as the Tokyo-based company cut costs and benefited from an industrywide increase in travel demand.

“The job cuts are necessary to correspond with our shrinking operations,” Onishi said.

Japan Airlines received court backing for its turnaround plan last month, after being delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange earlier this year.

The carrier sold 33 Boeing Co. 747s and MD-80s as of the end of August, according to spokeswoman Sze Hunn Yap. The airline had 278 planes at the end of March, according to its website.

The airline had eliminated 8,000 jobs by September, according to the Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corp. of Japan, which is overseeing JAL’s turnaround and has agreed to invest 350 billion yen in the carrier.