The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has outlined its provisional allocation of Tokyo Haneda daytime slots to local carriers following submissions in April this year.

During bilateral talks in February this year, the DOT and the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLITT) agreed to increase the number of slot-pairings allocated to US carriers from the current four (all night-time), to six constituting five daytime slots (i.e. limited to use between 06h00L and 22h55L) and one night-time slot (i.e. limited to use between 22h00L and 06h55L), with effect from late-October of this year.

The DOT awarded Hawaiian Airlines the US's sole Haneda night-time slot in May. Hawaiian was the sole applicant to apply for the slot-pairing and plans to use it to operate a year-round service to Haneda from Honolulu (4x weekly) and Kona (3x weekly).

As it stands, the DOT has provisionally awarded the five daytime slots as follows:

-American Airlines (AA, Dallas/Fort Worth): one slot pair for its proposed Los Angeles International-Haneda service; -Hawaiian Airlines (HA, Honolulu): one slot pair for its proposed Honolulu-Haneda service; -United Airlines (UA, Chicago O'Hare): one slot pair for its proposed San Francisco-Haneda service; -Delta Air Lines (DL, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson): two slot pairs for its proposed Los Angeles-Haneda and Minneapolis St. Paul International-Haneda services.

Given its recent stand-off with Delta concerning its underexploitation of Haneda slots for its seasonal Seattle Tacoma International service, the DOT has proposed to add a condition to Delta's Minneapolis award.

The Department says that should Delta significantly deviate from its original proposal (daily service using B767-300(ER) and/or B777-200(ER) equipment), its Minneapolis authority will automatically terminate with that of the backup carrier’s automatically instating.

The DOT has selected American's daily Dallas/Fort Worth-Tokyo Haneda proposal as a backup to Delta’s primary award for Minneapolis-Haneda service.

Parties have until July 30 to submit their objections.