Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them - Wired

[MerryHolidays]

This is sickening beyond belief, figuratively and literally.


Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them
CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER
BUSINESS
FEB 2, 2022 7:00 AM

IN DECEMBER 2021, 27,591 aircraft took off or landed at Frankfurt airport—890 every day. But this winter, many of them weren’t carrying any passengers at all. Lufthansa, Germany’s national airline, which is based in Frankfurt, has admitted to running 21,000 empty flights this winter, using its own planes and those of its Belgian subsidiary, Brussels Airlines, in an attempt to keep hold of airport slots.

Although anti-air travel campaigners believe ghost flights are a widespread issue that airlines don’t publicly disclose, Lufthansa is so far the only airline to go public about its own figures. In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.

https://www.wired.com/story/airplanes-empty-slots-covid/

[3Hotdogs]

1. Greta is wonderful.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

2. Well, maybe the rules need to be changed, morons!

Sheesh! Unregulated capitalism is economic equivalent of the inmates running the asylum.

[lagomorph777]

8. Airports need to base slot assignments on passengers through gates, not planes.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

11. Yep.

It's obvious the existing system is not working.

[jmowreader]

14. Either that...

…or treat gates as real estate. If Lufthansa needs 20 gates at FRA, either write a traditional lease for them like you’d do for an apartment, or pretend they’re weirdly-shaped condominiums.

[reACTIONary]

17. Unregulated capitalism? Give me a break...

... The airline industry, even after "deregulation" is highly regulated. And the airports are, basically, state owned monopolies. This isn't a problem of unregulated capitalism. It's a problem of rationalizing regulation in the face of changing (and emergency) circumstances.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

21. Ask yourself this...

why would governments enforce this type of "regulation" in the given situation? I'm pretty sure the answer to that will bring you right back around to unregulated capitalism. Someone is making bank on this being the way it is and it's not the airlines. Unregulated capitalism is not limited to commerce, the very structures in place to sustain it are also rife with fraud, waste and abuse.

Unregulated capitalism is a bane to humankind.

[reACTIONary]

22. If the airline industry were unregulated, the way this would work...

... would be that the airport would sell or lease slots to the highest bidder. And maybe the highest bidder could sublease them. In any case, there would be no need to run empty planes to keep your slots. And if you couldn't use them, you could sublease and they would not go to waste.

Under regulated capitalism, there is an attempt to allocate resources in some manner that is "fair and equitable', rather than to the highest bidder. In this case, the number of planes that are typically scheduled to fly in and out. That probably works pretty well under normal conditions, but maybe not so well during a sharp decrease in traffic due to a pandemic.

Market resource allocation works very well in general, but doesn't always fit well with notions of what is fair and equitable. Regulated allocation can work well, especially where fairness is more important than economic efficiency. But it isn't self adjusting in changing circumstances, particularly unusual circumstances like a pandemic.

In this case we are not seeing market failure, we are seeing regulatory failure.

[Emile]

3. You would think airlines would save share holders

money by cancelling the flights and paying the crew their wage.

[MerryHolidays]

5. That's the problem...government agencies that control slot allocation won't let them

If an airline doesn't use a slot, it is at risk of losing it. These are extremely valuable rights at key airports around the world. AFAIK, it is governmental agencies (or organizations working under the color of national law) that award these rights.

During the pandemic, these slot requirements should have been waived by the agencies. Then these flights wouldn't have occurred.

[Emile]

6. That's so crazy. Here we are trying to save the planet

and crazy stuff like this continues.

[thesquanderer]

12. re: "During the pandemic, these slot requirements should have been waived by the agencies"

They have been, to varying extents. From the article:

In March 2020, the European Commission suspended “use it or lose it” rules that require airlines to fly 80 percent of the flight slots they’re allocated at European airports or have their berths given to competitors. The rules have been waived before, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US and the aftermath of the 2008-9 financial crash. While the 80 percent rule hasn’t returned, a requirement for airlines to use 50 percent of their slots was instated in October 2021 and will increase to 64 percent in March 2022. “Even if we are not there yet, we can take a step further toward the return to normal airport slot management next summer,” says European commissioner for transport Adina-loana Vălean. The UK, which left the European Union in January 2020, has set its use it or lose it level at 70 percent.

[forgotmylogin]

15. I don't believe all routes are just back and forth round trips...

I would suspect it's a matter of flight connections with routinely schedule flights that have multiple nodes.

If a plane is routinely scheduled to fly from A to B to C daily, and no seats are sold at airport A, it still needs to travel to airport B to pick up those passengers who booked and are expecting to get to airport C. If the plane is empty at airport A, it could cause scheduling chaos for everyone further down the line if they cancel it. I don't imagine airports are able to just rev up a spare unscheduled plane to start from Airport B to cut the empty route from A to B.

Like a bus route - just because nobody gets on at early stops and the bus is empty, the bus doesn't stop running the route because passengers further along may depend on it. Unfortunately, a single empty plane takes a lot more resources to run than an empty bus.

This is a guess. I could be wrong, and I wish there was a way to save resources with empty flights.

[msfiddlestix]

4. Jeeze. shaking head in disbelief.

[patphil]

7. The whole concept of slots is just insane. There's got to be a better way to do this.

All those empty planes equals massive pollution, and a major expense that passengers end up covering in the price of their tickets.
That's a lot of fuel and maintenance for essentially nothing.

[lagomorph777]

10. I think slots are unavoidable - gates are a costly resource.

But the rules for slot assignments are badly skewed.

Base it on passengers at the gate, not planes at the gate.

[dalton99a]

9. Idiotic.

[IronLionZion]

13. Time to change the slot policy

have the airlines pay for it or something.

I hate wasting fuel. As someone who used to drive 4 hours a day to different cities, I use work from home opportunities during COVID as much as I can.

[maxsolomon]

16. Jet travel has an enormous carbon cost.

This is truly irresponsible.

[MerryHolidays]

18. It is quite something when Greta Thunberg and the head of Lufthansa are aligned

I am no aviation expert, but something is terribly wrong. The amount of waste (time, money, safety) and pollution must be staggering.

I wonder if there are comparable states for US airports and airlines?

[Farmer-Rick]

19. That is so typical of our thoroughly broken capitalist economic system

Empty houses while people live on the street, used cars selling for more than new cars, massive food waste while people go hungry, people buying and selling code on a computer and passanger airplanes flying with no passengers.

Karl Marx predicted most of this. Not the particulars.....he didn't know about computers. But he predicted we would buy and sell imaginary items. That waste would become more and more excessive while people suffered for want of those wasted items. Governments failing to support most citizens and only assisting the already wealthy. Concentrating more and more wealth in a few people's hands while most people suffer from lack of resources.

It will get worse and weirder.

[taxi]

20. A valid question is whether these flights fly to other airfields or

do they take off, fly in a predetermined manner, and return to the same location? Planes that don't fly may not age well.

[DFW]

23. I wonder where those flights go to.

The flights I have been on, in and out of Germany, in the last six months, have been relatively full to packed. I’d sure like to know which flights are flying empty. Riga? Almaty? Pristina? Khartoum? Sardine can flyer here would like to know.