Originally Posted by
Longboater
There a certain "Honu" issue that pretty much killed a UA return to HNL-TYO flying. A double decker Honu issue. UA currently has the late night/early morning slot for US-HND flying. It is using it on HND-GUM. Realistically, that late night slot for HND works best for HNL-HND but as I said, there is a "Honu" issue and HAL gave up that late night slot. In hindsight, DOT should have given it to HAL and no daytime HND slots for them and given it to one of the US3.
To be honest, I don't think any US3 carrier should be flying HNL to TYO. Delta is getting destroyed on their HNL-HND route, flying their ancient 763s. Outside of March this year, Delta has been between 10 to 20% behind JAL and ANA on this route, and has LFs as low 42% (!) in April of this year. I actually have no idea why Delta thinks it can make HNL-HND work with an 8% market share at HNL. Their yields are consistently half or worse than JAL/ANA.
Ultimately, Japanese carriers (and HA if they stayed) are preferred due to the close ties between Hawaii and Japan. And UA is covered with its ANA JV, and AA would be too, but for some reason JAL prefers to codeshare w/ HA, and the AA JV doesn't extend to HNL.