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Lufthansa confirmed that 18k flights had been flown empty to keep slots
- throwoutway 5y agoWhat a waste of fuel and useless emissions. They could just change the rule that if there is 0 passenger or a no show, that the airline can cancel the flight before closing the door. But the staff must show up and be ready. That would ensure that (1) people will book confidently and not create a death spiral, while 2) avoiding wasteful emissions
- aembleton 5y agoThen these flights would still operate, but with a few passengers on board. They probably could sell some seats, but that would require them to provide full flight crew which would cost them money. Instead, they probably moved those passengers on to other flights.
- gengelbro 5y agoSurely they flew cargo? This seems absent in the article.
- jacob019 5y agoGod I hope so. Burning fuel for nothing but bureaucratic red tape seems horribly unethical.
- Jensson 5y agoCompanies has done way worse things to make money, this needs a regulatory fix. If they don't do it some other company would just fill those slots and fly empty and come out ahead, even a minor company would raise capital and take the slots since it means lots of future profits. This is the strength of capitalism, if one player drops the ball another will pick it up, meaning if you want the player to drop the ball then you need to not just complain about that player but instead you need to remove the incentives to hold the ball.
- jacob019 5y agoThere's plenty of blame to go around, the regulators have failed.
- runarberg 5y agoFor some reason this comment made me think about bitcoin. If you squint your eyes cryptomining is kind of a red tape activity.
- raverbashing 5y agoProbably yes. Cargo and mail still flies even with an empty plane For some flights this might even make it profitable without passengers (but those are rare long haul routes)
- pengaru 5y agoWhere, in the luggage compartment? I doubt it's worth the trouble, and they certainly didn't gut the planes.
- WalterBright 5y agoInstead of forcing the airlines to fly empty, just charge them for maintaining the flight slot. Everybody wins, including the environment. Of course, the correct way to allocate slots is to auction them off.
- thehappypm 5y agoNo, I am not sure. An airport’s purpose is to fly passengers. I don’t really want a mechanism for airlines to pay just to have empty gates. Isn’t that kind of dystopian? Shuttered gates, paid for by Delta to ensure its monopoly?
- somebodythere 5y agoI mean it's not like they were flying passengers regardless.
- thehappypm 5y agoThey would gladly have passengers if the demand was there.
- thematrixturtle 5y agoIt's the airport equivalent of a land tax: making people pay for hogging scarce resources is a strong incentive to either use them or sell them off to somebody else who will.
- quantified 5y agoExactly. Let Lutfhansa spend all its money to fly the empty planes.
- KSteffensen 5y agoI'm sure this could be worked out using some combination of paying for the slot and requiring a minimum amount of passengers/cargo. Exact numbers would require some tuning by people who know about this but doesn't seem impossible to get right. E.g. have airlines pay a fee for any empty seat below an 80% full plane. Having planes fly empty to maintain a monopoly is just bad all around
- lancesells 5y agoWhile it's a small percentage of overall flights worldwide this is just wrong. Laws are complex but why waste this huge amount of resources and add to global warming.
- Karupan 5y agoI can't even comprehend what a colossal waste this is! And they ask me why I have chronic anxiety.
- vmception 5y agoThis uses the amount of energy or carbon emissions of which country? We should make headlines this way all the time
- seibelj 5y agoI wonder how many millennia of using paper straws a single day of this fiasco wiped out from carbon savings.
- dghlsakjg 5y agoPaper straws are generally more energy and resource intensive than plastic straws. The switch to paper straws was theoretically about eliminating single use plastics. As someone who has done scientific surveys of beach flotsam: my personal feeling is that the switch to paper straws will change precisely nothing as far as global plastic pollution goes.
- seibelj 5y agoHold on - you’re saying that by using paper straws, you damage the earth even more than plastic ones? Plus they don’t even work? Why is this not all over the news!?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vimy 5y agoAlmost all the plastic alternatives are worse. Plastic is a wonder material and unfairly demonized. Instead of banning plastics we should have invested in waste management infrastructure in the developing countries where almost all the ocean plastic originates from. Probably would have been cheaper too.
- inyorgroove 5y agoNo mention about how most plastics contain endocrine disruptors[1], this is having a real world impact on human procreation. BPA was only the first of many boogie chemicals in this space. This is also impacting children in a way we don't understand fully yet [2]. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3572204/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3572204/
- Bhurn00985 5y agoI'm sure me switching to LED lamps will have offset this properly...
- analognoise 5y ago
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
- xattt 5y agoWhat about the mild discomfort of keeping your home at 19°C in the winter?
- bsder 5y agoThat used to be a much bigger deal in the US back in 1975. Our house had a coal bin and a coal fired boiler at that point. Insulation was non-existent in many places. With almost 50 years of construction differences, moving that thermostat saves much less energy nowadays.
- passerby1 5y agoHow about +13 while just wearing more clothes? That would do a huge impact on ecology. Maybe even save us another hundred or so years before global warming comes
- benjamir 5y agoWhat discomfort? My children and I go barefoot and T-Shirt while the rooms have 19°C. They are slim and muscular, ideal BMI, so spare me any "fat isolates" comments.
- xattt 5y agoSubjectively, I am chilly keeping my house at 19° than at 22°. Not sure if this is an effect of thermostat placement or Nest’s algorithm for hot water rad heat (True Radiant).
- ancorevard 5y agoGovernment regulations overrules natural feedback mechanisms.
- medion 5y agoWhat a broken and unethical system. Again, no one held accountable, all in the name of business.
- tyingq 5y agoThat's true, though it's a tricky problem. The requirement to fly was to ensure airlines weren't buying gates, then not using them, solely to stave off competitors. That situation results in less capacity, direct-connect cities, flights, etc, to serve the airport's customers. It's also not feasible to switch carriers too often, as the carriers need some amount of infrastructure of their own, time to fold in service/schedules, local employees or contractors, etc. Some airports now have common use gate terminals, networks, kiosks...that helps, but it's only a small percentage of them. I'm sure there's a better system for how things are now, but I think it was set up with the right ideas in mind at the time.
- seibelj 5y agoThe airline and airport industries are some of the most regulated industries on the planet. A free market would not cause this.
- refurb 5y agoAll in the name of business? It's a government rule that causing this? Pretty sure the airlines would love to not burn money holding a spot.
- c17r 5y agoSaw somewhere last week that Air Brussels did the same thing with 3,000 flights Edit: it was HN apparently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818050
- Scoundreller 5y agoSo here’s my guess on why countries like to assign use-it-of-lose-it “slots”: it’s easiest for the local flagship airline to keep its slots because it can do a short-haul flight wherever. Meanwhile, Lufthansa has to fly all the way to Elbobia to keep its elbonian slots and has the most incentive to give them up.
- sverhagen 5y agoThis would be a local flagship airline with no international flights then?
- Scoundreller 5y agoThe local airline can fly much shorter distances for a legal flight. $Country airlines can only fly from $Country. E.g. the local Dutch airline can keep its dutch spots a lot more easily than a Canadian airline.
- sverhagen 5y agoI was just saying, how does it really help the Dutch airline to have all these slots in the Netherlands if they can't use them to fly to, say, hm, Canada?
- Scoundreller 5y agoSo when flying to canada resumes, the Dutch airline gets all the business because Air Canada “lost” its slots. (I’m assuming airlines own slots and not routes).
- sverhagen 5y agoDon't they need slots at the Canadian airport too? So both Canadian and Dutch airlines end up holding slots they can't use. I don't see anyone benefiting here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 5y agoFTA: they flew 18k empty even after removing 33k flights (and even as the requirement went down to 50%, or maybe 65%) Sounds like there are no good answers here, omicron came too quickly
- hiptobecubic 5y agoSeems like one good answer would be to fly none of them empty. We could have suspended the rule for gates reserved prior to the pandemic, for example.
- raverbashing 5y agoYeah, suspending it for a while sounds like the best idea now. But hindsight is 20/20. Summer fights were almost normal. And even flights up to December weren't too affected.
- frandroid 5y agoOnly make flights with a minimum of 35% passenger load count towards operating the slot
- trhway 5y agoSo the airlines will start hire passengers :)
- Scoundreller 5y agoLufthansa is pretty far away from crossing the $0 threshold.
- stunt 5y agoThat means they have to put staff on all flights. I'm sure someone did the calculation and what they do today was the most cost effective.
- frandroid 5y agoThat's what I'm saying--put a higher cost on running empty planes. If they have to give away 100 tickets (or pay passengers to fly!) and staff the plane, they might start wondering whether it's worth it. Also that kind of giveaway would deflate prices across the market, making this empty planing a ruinous exercise for everyone.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tyronehed 5y agoThe executives behind these industries that are wantonly polluting and leading us inexorably to climate catastrophe are going to have to explain to their kids why it was Climate Genocide was necessary... for the sake of the shareholders.
- herodoturtle 5y ago> ... for the sake of the shareholders. Now made even messier by the German government's 20% stake, which resulted from the Covid-induced necessity for a state bailout.
- throwaway4good 5y agoTalk to Ryanair. Seriously.
- aembleton 5y agoThey also had empty flights: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair-flights-cancelled-empty-planes-fleet-grounded-coronavirus-lockdown-a9437186.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair... This was nearly a year ago. Have they done something since to correct this that you could expand on?
- civilized 5y agoLufthansa is not without blame here, but they're just responding to incentives from European administrators - the same people that brought you "chopping down America's forests to be burned in European power plants, because they'll grow back so it's green!" [1] I truly despise the global administrative class. [1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/4/18216045/renewable-energy-wood-pellets-biomass https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/4/18216045/ren...
- omginternets 5y ago“Just responding to incentives” truly is the new “just following orders”. I don’t care if they made money, it’s still immoral. Edit: thank god I recycled some cans today.
- gruez 5y ago>it’s still immoral. Is it really immoral to follow orders that were issued by an entity that has a monopoly on violence?
- omginternets 5y agoYes. I think you may be conflating morality and self-preservation.
- gruez 5y agoSo if someone held a gun to your head and demanded that you kill someone, and you pulled the trigger, then you're doing something morally wrong? I feel like my sense of morals at least allows for doing something morally wrong if you're being forced to do it.
- skinnymuch 5y agoThis example is not at all representative of how things actually are. Most of all not for non disenfranchised companies and people. There’s no NATO nation remotely holding a gun to any big companies head. In any sense of the word. I have to think again just wow. Your example is such an extreme stretch with almost no relation to reality.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoWhat is the fuel cost when flying empty vs with passengers?
- jacknews 5y agoinsanity
- nimbius 5y agoSo what I'm hearing is carbon footprint is something you only have to care about when the good times are rolling and things like business continuity planning and risk analysis could have in no way stymied this practice of ghost flights which will surely go down in history as one of capitalisms more opulent and pointless excesses.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- casion 5y agoCould someone explain this concept of "slots" in the context of airlines? I read the article and it's not much clearer to me.
- vulcan01 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_slot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_slot Essentially, a permit granted by an airport to an airline to schedule a takeoff or landing at a particular time / around that time.
- kjhughes 5y agoRegulation is as challenging as adding features to complex software systems. Achieving the desired outcome without causing any undesired consequences is very hard. In some ways, it's even harder than adapting complex software systems: At least software systems don't commonly consist of subsystems with independent, self-interest-seeking goal structures that lobby you during design for features they favor or exploit latent defects post-deployment.
- Gigachad 5y agoAnd in software you can test the change locally rather than having to pitch an untested idea to the world and run the test live.
- PeopleB4Cars 5y agoYou can do that in regulation too, it's called a pilot program
- bcrosby95 5y agoI don't know if this is a joke, but working at large software organizations with many independent teams is a lot like what you just described.
- quantified 5y agoBoth always need to be debugged in production with real participants and don’t get patches quickly enough.
- lathiat 5y agoThis existed pre-COVID but is more of a thing now. See Half as Interesting - Why Heathrow Airport Had Empty Flights to Nowhere (3 years ago, pre-covid) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8XZriAdB1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8XZriAdB1g RealLifeLore2 also covered the same topic as the original submission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR1a_LO4hSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR1a_LO4hSk
- thelittleone 5y agoDefinitely a win fhe environment. One factor though is pilot recency. Pilots need to fly often for safety reasons.
- runarberg 5y agoCan’t they fly a simulator instead?
- sofixa 5y agoCheck out the Tenerife air disaster ( deadliest ever) for what happens when a pilot spends too long on a simulator and forgets real life details, while in a very bad situation ( bad weather and overcrowded airport). Protocols have drastically improved since then, but still, simulator isn't the same as real world flying.
- blibble 5y agobad, unchangeable EU regulation strikes again meanwhile, in a country that left the EU: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2021/1200/made/data.pdf https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2021/1200/made/data.pdf > These Regulations make three changes in relation to slots allocated for the scheduling period which runs from 31st October 2021 to 26th March 2022 ... > the list of reasons on the basis of which non-utilisation of slots can be justified, which appears in Article 10(4) of the Regulation, is expanded to include certain government-imposed measures related to COVID-19 which severely reduce the viability of, or demand for passenger travel on, the route in question.
- Zenst 5y agoGood stuff, though from my understanding a slot is a airport allocation to land/take off. So an airline would have slots at the departure and destination airports and with that, some would be forced to make the flights to cater for the other end connection. So I had a dig and see if the EU did anything and they did it seems - https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021/01/27/new-covid-19-slot-relief-to-help-airlines-and-avoid-ghost-flights-council-adopts-mandate/ https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021... Though it does seem that the results are mixed and good coverage here: https://www.airportwatch.org.uk/2022/01/european-airlines-having-to-fly-empty-flights-due-to-continuing-slot-use-requirement/ https://www.airportwatch.org.uk/2022/01/european-airlines-ha...
- sofixa 5y ago> bad, unchangeable EU regulation strikes again It's literally in the begining of the article, the regulations were adapted for COVID, but it was apparently insufficient. Do you have any valid criticism of the regulation or is it just "bad" because "Europe"? > meanwhile, in a country that left the EU At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small.
- blibble 5y ago> but it was apparently insufficient. "apparently insufficient" doesn't count as bad? relaxing these requirements during a period of heavily restricted air travel is an objectively correct policy the organisation's institutional inflexibility/political inability to solve this very simple problem is yet another demonstration of the EU's current structure being unfit for purpose (or able to respond in a timely manner to current events) > At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small. there are plenty note that any perceived negative changes are immediately reported as a direct consequence of leaving however the converse is not true: positive changes don't tend to be reported as a direct consequence of leaving make of this what you will (and unsurprisingly: it takes a while to see the effects of more responsive and accountable governance)
- passerby1 5y agoThat's something cynical to shouting about green energy and tolerate firing so much fuel for nothing at the same time. Anyone else feel te same or is it just me?
- civilized 5y agoYou don't even have to look at inconsistency on different issues. Euro-crats are also stupid and/or evil on the issue of green energy itself. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/4/18216045/renewable-energy-wood-pellets-biomass https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/4/18216045/ren...
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIt seems safer to keep mechanical things running regularly…
- nlitened 5y agoAnd pilots getting regular practice.
- uwagar 5y agokafka like red tape nonsense messes up environment big time.
- Maakuth 5y agoSo the slot reservations are maintained by proof of work?
- quantified 5y agoEmpty work. Slots aren’t maintained by moving passengers but by moving planes.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agosurely you don't have to fly every flight to keep the slot open, as there are such things as cancelled flights due to mechanical issues + weather anyway. So how does the rules for the slots work - it says "EU rules require that airlines operate a certain percentage of scheduled flights to keep their slots at major airports." are cancellations due to weather taken off of this percentage, I mean you would think so because otherwise phenomena such as that volcano in Iceland about a decade ago would mean everyone loses their slots? So what about mechanical issues? Are you allowed a certain percentage - is there a buffer or has anyone ever had too many mechanical issues and lost a slot thereby because they went down below the percentage. on edit: text somewhat confused as we have the percentage of flights that can be missed, and my asking about the percentage of mechanical issues that one can have as well as the percentage of cancellation of flights due to weather and how it affects things.
- MrDresden 5y agoI just cant get over how dumb this system is (given the current situation). Why wasn't this solved another way... /rhetorical-question
- WalterBright 5y ago"As a result of Lufthansa Group’s latest figures, the Belgian federal government has written to the European Commission, calling for a change to the rules on maintaining slots." Sad that it took EIGHTEEN THOUSAND empty flights before the bureaucrats noticed something might be amiss.
- throwawayffffas 5y agoI doubt their cargo holds were empty.
- captainmuon 5y agoThere should be a special government office whose sole job is to identify ridiculous situations like this and be able to fast track a pragmatic solution. Maybe you could call them an arbiter - not because they arbitrate anything, but because they can act arbitrarily, that is, they have the power to make exceptions from the rule. A lot of people don't have faith in democracy and call for a "strong man" to take matters in his own hands. I believe if there was an office like this, we could take the wind out of their sails.
- nightowl_games 5y agoBasically every government office should be capable of handling this kind of situation. We don't need a "new but different government office, we need faster more reliable government in every office.
- bluesign 5y ago170k flights last quarter, lets say 60k for the rest quarters each. (Covid effect) 350k Lufthansa flights, 18k empty. Which is around 5%. Considering covid levels of traffic last 2 years, this 5% is totally ignorable. But ofc it is always good to justify plastic straws etc.
- csomar 5y agoFunnily enough Lufthansa cancelled two of my flights in 2020. Their solution to avoid refunds was to completely remove my bookings from their system and assumes it no longer exists. Their local representative is clueless, their phone support never answers and there is no way to contact a human being there. But now I get why: They have been busy flying empty planes. I can't blame them too much though. They are trying to cope up with regulations and their competitors are fierce.
- schrijver 5y agoThis info is not entirely correct: they cite ‘the bulletin’, which links to sources that say Brussels airlines is planning to make 3000 unnecessary flights, as part of 18.000 flights planned by their mother company Lufthansa. Lufthansa published this news themselves, I presume they also hope the rules get changed. Not that one should have sympathy for the airline, but it’s good to keep the facts straight. And note that in this case, pressure on the EU officials could still help prevent (at least a part of) these flights.
- shawnb576 5y agoAs civilization begins to crumble due to extreme weather, rising seas, and refugee migrations, one thing we can say is “well, at least we kept our flight slots”
- duck 5y agoRelated article from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818050