Ryukyu Air Commuter
Japanese Airline
Ryukyu Air Commuter (RAC) is a Japanese regional airline headquartered in Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. It operates domestic passenger services from the island of Okinawa to other islands of Okinawa Prefecture and the Amami Islands, Kagoshima Prefecture. It is owned by Japan Transocean Air (74.5%), Okinawa Prefecture (6.3%), Minamidaitō (4.8%) Kumejima (4.3%) Kitadaitō (4.0%) and other shareholders (6.1%).
History
Ryuku Air Commuter was established on December 24, 1985, with help from joint investments from the local government and local businesses. The following year they received the air transport license and the airline started operating flights between Naha and Kerama on the 17th of February 1987. This route was operated with a Britten-Norman BN-2B Islander seating up to nine people. The next route introduced by the airline was from Naha to Aguni and commenced on December 20, 1989.
On November 16, 1992, Ryuku Air Commuter took over two De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft from Japan Transocean Air (then known as 'Southwest Air Lines'), with a capacity of 19 seats this aircraft type had a significantly higher capacity than the BN-2B. With the introduction of these new aircraft, the airline was able to increase its operations and also operate out of other airports than just Naha. With this growth in the operations the airline started to grow into a commuter airline with wide network of the islands within the prefecture, with the main hub being from the island of Okinawa (Naha Airport).
As a replacement for the DHC-6 Twin Otter the DeHavilland Bombardier Dash 8 100 (DHC-8-100) was introduced in 1997, allowing for even greater capacity by seating up to 39 seats.
“Ryukyu Air Commuter” enters the record as japanese Airline. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ryukyu, Commuter and Japanese can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1154361. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 1987, 1989 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ryukyu Air Commuter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.