The boss of Air New Zealand says he'll spend a flight to Japan personally apologising to passengers for the inconvenience of diverting to pick up a trade delegation stranded after the Prime Minister's plane broke down.
Otherwise his seat is at the back of the plane - row 66 right next to the loo.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was forced to fly commercial to Japan after the Defence Force 757 clapped out in Papua New Guinea on Sunday after two fuses blew while refuelling.
That meant leaving behind 52 people who were travelling with him.
But as luck would have it Air New Zealand chief executive Greg Foran was one of them and he told Checkpoint they were able to thumb a ride for the group by diverting a flight to Japan through Brisbane.
"Things were pretty grim yesterday afternoon, as you can imagine as things unfolded."
But one of the options was to check on the availability of seats on an Air New Zealand flight to Narita.
"One of the options that we looked at was to make a quick call back and say, well just how many seats do we have on this flight tomorrow.
"With a bit of luck, it did actually work out just about perfectly. So we've got a very full plane now."
Passengers already on the flight experienced about a two-hour delay due to the Brisbane detour, said Foran.
"I'm forever grateful, that hopefully they're going to be OK with that. I'll be on that plane in a few minutes and I'll make sure that I personally go around and thank them all and do my job on making sure that we look after them."
He did not know how much all of this would cost, he said.
"At the end of the day, we've actually been flat out ... just doing the logistics."
Trip worth it to promote tourism
Foran believed it was still worth going to Japan despite arriving nearly a day later than planned.
It was a "really great tourist market" for Air New Zealand, he said.
"There's a lot of Kiwis heading out to Japan and we're putting on a bigger gauge flight, a 777 will start running on that particular route and that's got another 40 or 50 seats on it, so over the season that's another 30,000 seats.
"So we're very keen to get out there and promote Japan as a tourist destination and interestingly, it's been a massive ... inbound market for us over the years."
Foran said that had not rebounded after Covid so this was a chance to get more Japanese visitors to New Zealand.
When asked whether Air New Zealand had the capacity for charter flights for Luxon due to Defence Force plane troubles, Foran's response was, "It depends".
He said while this time they could accommodate everyone, it was also the slowest point of the season.
"Sometimes it could be leasing a plane for a period and other times it could be just using a flight that's already going."
