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Cathay Pacific to ground six 747-400s[/b]
Dateline: Wednesday December 05, 2001

Cathay Pacific plans to park six 747-400s--more than a quarter of its dash 400 fleet--at
Avalon in Australia.

Some of the airline's high-profit routes are running at a loss and the first quarter of
2002 "will be very worrying," Director- Corporate Development Tony Tyler said.
Cathay's RPKs fell 18% in Oct. but that doesn't reveal fully the depth of the decline on high-profit routes to Japan and the US; North Asia routes to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea were down 20.6%. "Japan, an important market for all airlines in the region, has shown itself to be very weak. The Japanese are just not traveling," Tyler said. Cathay has slashed capacity to the US by 25%, raising load factors to 70% while overall load factors have fallen to 65%.

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