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ANA, Japan's largest airline, has selected "Flying Honu" as the theme for its limited edition livery to be used on the carrier's Airbus A380, which will be introduced on the Tokyo-Honolulu service, launching in spring 2019. The new route marks ANA's first introduction of the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger airliner.
The aircraft's final design was selected from among 2,197 submissions from around the world, which were received by ANA during an open design contest conducted from Oct 7-Nov 30, 2016. An in-house selection committee awarded the grand prize to Chihiro Masuoka of Tokyo, for his concept "Sea Turtle Family," featuring the Hawaiian green sea turtle—a symbol of good luck and prosperity in Hawaii. Masuoka was awarded a pair of roundtrip business-class tickets for ANA's Tokyo-Honolulu route.
In addition to the design contest's grand prize winner, four runners up, including the creators of the design "Stephen+Cayden" from the state of Hawaii, will receive commemorative gifts from ANA.
Known as "Honu" in the Hawaiian language, the green sea turtle is considered a sacred creature, and is widely loved by the people of Hawaii. ANA selected "Flying Honu" as the nickname to call the special edition aircraft, with the hopes to pass on some of the happiness and luck to its passengers to Hawaii.
ANA Group will be supporting activities in Hawaii to protect the Hawaiian green sea turtle, which is listed by The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a wild animal in danger of extinction.
ANA is moving forward with preparations to offer new passenger services to coincide with the introduction of the A380, and will provide updates as they become available.
© Japan Today
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Poor English Speaker
I heard that ANA's going to purchase two more A380s in near future. According to some business journals, although ANA could get the right to support Skymark Airlines, which was applying for the Civil Rehabilitation Act, ANA have to taking over what Skymark had to part with A380s by purchasing them as its compensation. So, my concern is that purchasing A380s, which are the enormous amount of money and are not fuel efficient, could become burden for ANA's business strategy. Because purchasing A380 isn't just its goal, that is to say, what ANA must do is installing new Full Flight Simulator for A380, constructing a hangar that is appropriate for it, training for employees for its maintenance, and much much more. Thus, introducing A380 is very attractive for customers at first sight, but heavy costs is behind it. I hope ANA's decision to actually works in a positive way.