Amakusa Airlines

Is Amakusa Airlines safe?

Yes. Amakusa Airlines has flown since March 2000 without an accident of any kind in the records of the Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB): no deaths, no lost aircraft and no injured passengers. The catch is its size. Often called Japan's smallest airline, it has one 48-seat ATR 42-600, 61 staff and 2,867 flights in fiscal 2025, so a single slip in maintenance or one bad storm affects everything it does. We score it 83, just above its maintenance contractor Japan Air Commuter (82) and above Oriental Air Bridge (80), another island turboprop airline in Kyushu.

The airline was set up in 1998 by Kumamoto Prefecture, which still owns 53.3%, and the towns of the Amakusa islands, which own 26.85%. It flies three routes: Amakusa to Fukuoka three times a day, Amakusa to Kumamoto once a day, and Kumamoto on to Osaka Itami. It sells its own tickets as MZ flights and flies under its own call sign, "Amakusa Air" (AHX), so its record is its own.

One aircraft, and what happens when it is in the hangar

The ATR, registered JA01AM and painted as the dolphin "Mizoka", was delivered new in August 2015 and was 11 years old in August 2026. It flies about 2,900 times a year. The ATR 42-600 is a current production type with a modern glass cockpit, and the airline was the first in Japan to fly it.

There is no spare. When the Mizoka goes in for heavy checks, Amakusa Airlines borrows an ATR 42-600 from Japan Air Commuter (JAC) and flies it with its own pilots and cabin crew. That arrangement had a bad spring in 2025: on 18 March the borrowed aircraft was hit by lightning on the flight from Amakusa to Kumamoto, damaging the tail, and the airline cancelled every flight until early April while it was repaired. Nobody was hurt, and the JTSB did not treat it as an accident. In July 2025 a hydraulic fault grounded the airline again, cancelling every flight from 19 to 21 July.

The structural check that was missed

The most serious finding in the last ten years is about maintenance. JAC has maintained the Mizoka under contract since June 2018, while the airline's own small engineering department supervises the work. On 29 January 2025 JAC told the airline that a check for corrosion at the joint between the wing and the fuselage, required every 24,000 flights and due in April 2024, had not been done. The aircraft had flown 2,538 flights in the nine months since. The airline cancelled its flights for a day and a half, had the check done and reported to the Civil Aviation Bureau. Its safety report for fiscal 2024 lists no regulatory action as a result.

The same contractor was in trouble later that year. On 7 October 2025 the Osaka Regional Civil Aviation Bureau issued JAC a business improvement recommendation after finding that it had parked 212 aircraft defects in an unapproved tracking system and kept 433 records incompletely, on its own aircraft and on those it maintains for others. Amakusa Airlines said no improper repair or inspection had been found on the Mizoka, and that it would monitor JAC's fixes as the contracting operator. We count the missed check against Amakusa Airlines, because an airline is responsible for the work it contracts out.

Crew procedures have slipped too. On 12 August 2018 the pilots of flight MZ802 taxied at Osaka Itami without clearance from air traffic control. The airline took both off flying duty when they reached Kumamoto and, with only seven pilots on its books, cancelled 14 flights over three days.

The helicopter side of the business

Since 2001 the company has also flown Kumamoto Prefecture's fire and rescue helicopter under contract, from a base near Kumamoto Airport. On 7 March 2022 that helicopter, an Airbus AS365 with seven people on board, taxied onto the runway at Kumamoto without clearance while a training Cessna was approaching to land. The crew had been told to hold short and took a call cut off by another radio message as a clearance to line up. The controller saw the helicopter and sent the Cessna around; the aircraft were still about 2.5 km apart. The JTSB put the cause on the helicopter crew. This is not a passenger flight, so we weigh it lightly, but it was flown by the company's own pilots.

Outside our ten-year window, on 13 October 2015, the airline's old Dash 8-100 had an engine fire warning and white smoke on approach to Amakusa with 38 people on board. The crew shut the engine down and landed safely; no fire was found.

How to fly Amakusa Airlines

• Plan around cancellations. One aircraft means one fault or one typhoon stops the day. Book an early flight on the day you must travel, and know the backup: the road trip from the islands to the mainland takes about three hours.
• Check the day before in typhoon season. The airline posts cancellations on its website, sometimes a day ahead; it cancelled all flights on 28 October 2026 for a typhoon.

How we scored it

The accident record (90) is clean for 26 years, but the volume is small. Oversight (86) reflects Japan's strong regulator without confirmed IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary. The fleet (76) is one current-generation ATR aged 11 with no spare of its own. Serious incidents (72) carry the missed structural check of 2024, the 2018 taxi without clearance at Itami and, lightly, the 2022 helicopter runway incursion. The short island runway and typhoon season hold the environment at 74. Overall 83.