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Qatar Airways flying near-empty planes in Australia to exploit legal loophole
- icegreentea2 3y agoI'm doing it again - this is another lazy repackaged piece of "journalism". It's a bunch of links to other publications which did the actual heavy lifting, with some limp commentary thrown in. The "Bloomberg reported" link doesn't even go to the Bloomberg story (it goes to the Guardian... because its actually from the Guardian). The "according to Greenpeace" bit also straight up quotes it wrong (Yahoo says Greenpeace says yearly ghost flights cause pollution equivalent to 1.4 million cars, the Greenpeace headline says yearly ghost flights _in the EU_ cause pollution equivalent to 1.4 million cars). It's also funny because by fusing together a bunch of semi-unrelated stories, you end up bizarre combinations. The majority of the article isn't about airlines flying empty flights to keep their slots, it's about Qatar straight up avoiding taking up 'slots' (of sorts), but the call to action is about slot preserving ghost flights. Finally, it's a completely limp call to action, because the obvious solution (increase carbon taxes) is almost certainly unpalatable to the typical target audience of this article.
- esotericimpl 3y ago[dead]
- hluska 3y agoWould you mind humouring me for a moment? I have a strong suspicion (that I can’t prove) that this article was created by a primitive LLM. I believe that because: 1.) The article presents ‘facts’ that are completely wrong with complete confidence. This alone really seriously smells like an LLM. 2.) Those ‘facts’ are based off of misread quotes from the source pubs. The misreading seems to relate back to words being removed entirely from analysis or else assigned the wrong definition. I see few signs of human intelligence. What do you think? And for fun, assume the LLM is an adversary. How do we beat it?
- gmerc 3y agoIf by primitive LLM you mean humans, you’d be correct. It’s low paid jobs to create content to decorate the ads surface and been a staple of the publishing industry for years, no LLM required. No doubt these jobs will give way for LLMs down the road and even as we speak of course
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- hluska 3y agoI don’t know - I used to publish and maintain my interest in the publishing industry. This doesn’t sound anything like a human staffed content farm - they have their own works.
- dang 3y agoYes, https://news.yahoo.com/major-airline-faces-backlash-using-220000546.html https://news.yahoo.com/major-airline-faces-backlash-using-22... was quite a crap article. I've changed the URL above to the guardian.com report it points to. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pdx_flyer 3y agoAll while Qantas exploits their near monopoly over the market.
- throwaway2037 3y agoThank you for this post. Why isn't there a down vote button on articles?
- otterley 3y agoYou can flag them and it'll get the mods' attention.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ajmurmann 3y agoBesides the environmental impact, I worry about these rules around "keeping slots" impacting competitiveness of the market. It sounds like incumbents keeping a slot is the default. How can a new competitor come in, be innovative and put real pressure on incumbents? Does this slot system make that easier or harder?
- epilogue 3y agoIn my opinion, the issue here lies entirely with the Australian government. International airlines including Qatar have been trying to buy additional slots into major Australian airports, but have been turned down with some pretty questionable reasoning around “protecting the Australian aviation industry” (see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-30/qantas-qatar-airways-blocked-federal-government-accc/102792444 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-30/qantas-qatar-airways-... ) Meanwhile Qantas - a private company, who took over a billion AUD in government support during Covid are expected to pay the outgoing CEO over 20 million AUD in bonuses. Having flown several times between Qatar and Australia in the last couple years, I don’t think I’ve had a single flight that wasn’t completely booked out. In comparison to the following legs to Europe which have been more like 75% full. There is a real need for additional capacity on these routes (for those outside of Australia, the gulf countries, Hong Kong and Singapore are the most popular layover countries for Australians travelling to Europe, Africa and Asia due to their location) and the way I see it is that Qatar acknowledge that, tried to buy additional capacity and failing that have had to come up with some creative solutions to work around a government that values a sub-standard flag carriers profits over what’s best for the Australian consumer.
- grecy 3y ago> “protecting the Australian aviation industry” Australia has a very questionable history of this. For decades imported cars have been hit with heavy import taxes to "protect the Australian Automobile manufacturing industry". Now that no automobiles are manufactured in Australia (Ford and GM closed their plants), the heavy taxes have not gone away! There is also the super-controversial "luxury car tax" of 33% on vehicles over approx. $80k. Of course there is no luxury boat tax, luxury plane tax, luxury car tax, luxury watch tax or anything else of the sort.
- photonbeam 3y agoRe: luxury car tax Tall poppy syndrome, but as legislation. It’s culturally ingrained
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- isaacfrond 3y agotl;dr For example, one flight from Doha, Qatar, to Melbourne had an additional stop in the Australian city of Adelaide, which was registered as the final destination. Passengers would disembark the aircraft in Melbourne, but a few would remain in the terminal to make the final leg to Adelaide. (...) In this case, Qatar Airways was making these extra journeys to avoid caps that allow it to make only 28 weekly trips to Australia’s major airports, which includes Melbourne. Landing at Adelaide Airport, which is not among that list, as the final destination enabled the airline to make additional journeys to Melbourne, as there were no limits on flights to non-major airports.
- elmerfud 3y agoThe article seems to believe that only passengers are what fly on passenger airplanes. Many times on domestic routes cargo on these planes is more valuable than passengers. Occasionally even on international routes cargo is more valuable than passengers. I don't know about this specific case but clearly they were trying to get around the weekly cap but that doesn't mean the additional leg was a complete waste of resources because there's value in transporting cargo quickly from one area to another. I was actually taking a Delta flight internationally and they were bumping passengers to make room for additional cargo. Due to the length of the flight and the takeoff weight restrictions that cargo was more valuable than the cheap seats that were paid for.
- kalleboo 3y agoDon't the freedoms of the air that disallow the foreign airline from taking passengers boarding from Melbourne to Adelaide also disallow cargo on the same route? It seems unlikely that there is that big a discrepancy between passengers and cargo to a specific international connecting destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air#Eighth_freedom_(consecutive_cabotage) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air#Eighth_fre...
- gumby 3y agoThe article actually gives a completely different explanation: as a loophole to get around the cap on flights to Melb. Which is orthogonal to cargo vs passengers.
- adamsb6 3y agoIs that even a loophole? “You only get 28 flights with a final destination of Melbourne, and no cap on flights connecting through it” seems like it was designed to encourage this behavior.
- mannykannot 3y agoIt's a loophole, without any intent to encourage such behavior, if one of these rules was approved without anyone involved in the approval noticing that an existing rule allowed an exploitable workaround, or if it was assumed it would not be taken. A great many security breaches and other errors come about this way, and one cannot automatically assume intent from it happening, though one can ask "what were you thinking?" if the possibility was noticed but dismissed.
- curiousObject 3y ago>it’s on the aviation industry to rethink its policies on how airlines can keep their airport slots without causing further damage to the planet With insane regulations, like those that forced airlines to schedule tens of thousands of empty flights to keep their airport slots during Covid? No, it’s on regulators, not on the industry >Lufthansa said it ran 18,000 empty flights in the winter of 2021-2022 to ensure it didn’t lose lucrative deals that gave its planes spots at major airports.
- lwhi 3y ago> According to The National, German airline Lufthansa said it ran 18,000 empty flights in the winter of 2021-2022 to ensure it didn’t lose lucrative deals that gave its planes spots at major airports. This is scandalous.
- phantom784 3y agoThe airlines should be allowed to pay a fee equivalent to the cost of running the flight (or slightly less), rather than having to actually fly an empty plane.
- chii 3y agoBut then competitors would say that they would've paid a higher fee, in order to take those slots. So in the end, there would be some bidding, and the cost of those slots would increase to their actual value, which removes the worth of those slots. It "solves" the problem, but the airline who currently own the slot do not like this solution.
- YurgenJurgensen 3y agoIf the competitor thought they could actually fill the flights, they could probably offer slightly less. Passengers probably represent a net profit for airports, so an airline sitting on slots and not using them represents an opportunity cost.
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- NeoTar 3y ago> "no ticket sales were permitted for domestic passengers to board the plane from Melbourne to Adelaide" Isn't that relatively normal? I mean I think there are plenty of circumstances where an airline is permitted to fly internationally to a country, but it not permitted to operate (i.e sell tickets for) internal routes.
- kalleboo 3y agoThese rules are called the Freedoms of the air if you want to read more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air
- rootsudo 3y agoVery normal, it's protectionism so that local carriers e.g. quantas/jetstar have those locked down and not have foreign competition. Though Jet star is partially owned/operated by JAL and Quantas.
- stephen_g 3y agoThat last bit isn’t correct, Jetstar itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qantas. There is a smaller and separate ‘Jetstar Japan’ (a bit more than a quarter of the fleet size) that is partly owned by Qantas along with JAL and some other groups (including Mitsubishi Corporation) but that airline only flies domestically in Japan and internationally to a few countries in the area (Hong Kong, Phillipines, China, Taiwan).
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoYes - it's relatively normal - consecutive cabotage (aka "eighth freedom") means carrying passengers or cargo between two places in another country having started (or intending to end) the flight in your own country. So the MEL-ADL leg would have DOH-DEL-ADL would be an example of that for a Qatari flag carrier. Cabotage as a whole is pretty unusual outside of integrated aviation markets like Europe. I would be very surprised if Qatar and Australia had an agreement that permitted it. In that absence of such an agreement, it would probably be illegal for QR to sell those tickets.
- onionisafruit 3y agoThis page claims that Qatar is facing a backlash but never describes any backlash.
- hluska 3y agoThat’s because the link points to yahoo.com but the actual source is the Guardian. I can’t prove this but I suspect that yahoo.com uses a very primitive LLM to summarize articles from other pubs. Here is the guardian story. There are paragraphs about the backlash: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/09/ghost-flights-qatar-airways-flying-near-empty-planes-in-australia-to-exploit-legal-loophole https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/09/ghost-flights-... As kind of a general rule, if you see yahoo.com dig for the source publication and then google: Source_publication + yahoos_title
- compsciphd 3y agowonder what the airline feels about skiplagging? seems very similar.
- Zigurd 3y agoThe word "skiplagging" feels like a word coined to make the practice seem dubious and plausibly illegal. Like "jaywalking." Airlines exploit their customers, fail to disclose customer rights, and bend laws to their convenience all the time. The public would lose nothing if airlines were not bailed out every time there is a crisis. All the assets: The planes, the pilots, etc. could be subsidized through a crisis and acquired by new airlines and those wise enough to be be to survive a crisis. TBTF and "flag carriers" are welfare capitalism.
- Havoc 3y agoThis undermines entire public mindset too. I've seen multiple instance of memes on social media along the lines of "1000s empty flights. Good thing I recycled that empty tomato can!".
- danaris 3y agoTurn that around. The intention of many of these campaigns (like paper straws and paying attention to your individual carbon footprint) is, at least in part, to instill the idea that environmentalism should be all about individual action, rather than holding large companies to account for their role in pollution and environmental destruction. Recycling at a personal level is a good idea—but it can only ever be a small part of a solution, and it also requires that recycling be taken seriously by the places that actually take the recyclables away—that they genuinely recycle the stuff, rather than just sending it to a landfill in some other country.
- Simulacra 3y agoHollywood celebrities do this, Michael Bloomberg does this, they preach environmentalism and then get in their private jets, and fly around the world.
- hfuyf65 3y agoThat is ok though. He offset ( current magic word indicating its all good ).
- cmiller1 3y agoSeems like a poor argument against environmentalism though. "That guy who said we should be nice to each other was mean to someone! Therefore being nice is stupid and we should all be as cruel as possible!"
- mcpackieh 3y agoYou're speaking from the perspective of someone for whom the virtue of making personal sacrifices for environmental reasons is already obvious. Try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who doubts this. To those people, rich jetset climate activists come across like politicians who agitate against gay people then get caught having anonymous gay sex in airport bathrooms. Their hypocrisy is seen to invalidate the authenticity of their message.
- expertentipp 3y agoThey literally prefer to fly empty jets than to fly people cheaper. Still caressing your frequent flyer miles?
- toast0 3y agoFlying the mostly empty legs allows them to fly more times on the routes people want to go. Increasing supply on those routes should reduce passenger cost, even if the extra flight increases the airline cost.
- ExoticPearTree 3y agoFuel is cheap in Qatar, so they can offset this pretty easily.
- CYR1X 3y agoQuestion: What's the profitability to passenger ratio generally? Like is it linear? If so then this really isn't an airline problem it's a policy and customer problem. They are offering the flights as they are allowed by policy, which means it has to go to Adelaide, but customers don't want to fly there, so the plane is largely empty. If the customer demand was there then would the airline be so against selling more tickets like the article implies? If it's not linear, and like 30% capacity is less profitable than both a full plane or a near empty plane, then sure the airline could be abusing policy loopholes. I wonder if the policy penalizes cancellations then? Like what if the airline wanted to cancel these "ghost flights" for the sake of being more green? So they just always canceled the last leg.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- calfuris 3y agoNot many people want to fly Doha to Melbourne to Adelaide with a six hour layover when a direct flight from Doha to Adelaide is available.
- civilized 3y agoThe problem here is more "no price on carbon emissions" than "people game regulations" in my opinion.
- phantom784 3y agoI'm not sure how that would help here. The costs of tickets would go up proportionally, but the incentives to run the ghost flights would still be there.
- civilized 3y agoIt would make ghost flights more costly. This cost can't be recouped by increasing ticket prices because almost no one is on these flights, and it's unlikely that the few who take them will accept arbitrarily large fares.
- phantom784 3y agoThe ghost flight already loses money. It exists to enable the flight to Melbourne to exist - it is essentially an additional cost to run that flight. The increased cost would be passed on to the ticket prices of the Melbourne flight. The ghost flight would only be eliminated if the increased prices lower demand enough that the Melbourne flight (including the cost of running the ghost flight after it) becomes unprofitable.
- civilized 3y agoFrom what I can see here, we agree that carbon pricing would make it harder to run ghost flights, it's just we can't be sure whether it would become impossible. That depends on the details. But going back to my OP, I'm not that interested in ghost flights per se. I'm interested in the unnecessary CO2 they emit, and even there, mainly as a symptom of the broader problem of an unregulated, untaxed externality. I think this is the real reason to care about ghost flights. Someone could also care about ghost flights out of aesthetic opposition to waste or regulatory arbitrage, but I'm not interested in that.
- daft_pink 3y agoThey are turning the international air travel treaty on it's head. This is the country's regulators fault not the carriers fault. Australia bans carriers from flying domestic flights to protect their local carriers, but international carriers are allowed to make one connecting flight by treaty all over the world. Presumably the flights are profitable or they wouldn't run them, but it's Australia's fault that you can't buy a ticket not the airline's fault.
- demondemidi 3y agoLoopholes are both parties’ fault. The regulators for forgetting or lacking foresight. And the perp’s for being slimy. Unfortunately being slimy isn’t illegal.
- mattmaroon 3y agoI don’t think optimizing revenues legally is slimy. If flying from wherever to Adelaide with a stop in Melbourne where most people deplane is both legal and profitable I’d hardly consider them slimy for doing it. Stupid regulations like the one necessitating this drive costs up for passengers.
- demondemidi 3y agoWe have different ethics.
- fallingknife 3y agoThis practice is not slimy by the airline because everyone is getting exactly what they paid for. The passengers to Melbourne are getting a flight to Melbourne. The passengers to Adelaide are getting a flight to Adelaide. The government is getting the industry protection from international competition that it wanted by banning the airlines from selling flights from Melbourne to Adelaide to fill the seats. The airline wants to minimize empty seats and the government wants to allow domestic airlines to extract excess profit by protecting domestic airlines from competition but DGAF about empty seats. Therefore it is the governments fault that there are empty seats.
- ctippett 3y agoAll airports have capacity constraints, there's the limit to how many planes can take-off/land, but also with how many gates and maintenance facilities they have. I actually support the idea of shifting some of this capacity to nearby airports, especially if it results in lower fares for passengers. If I'm generous with their intentions, Australia were probably trying encourage tourism to smaller cities, bring business to local economies, increase competition on quieter routes, etc. Unfortunately it seems Qatar thought it easier/cheaper to fly the last leg empty instead of marketing tickets to the final destination. For what it's worth, I actually flew London-Melbourne-Adelaide earlier this year. I booked a separate flight for MEL-ADL since it was cheaper than booking the whole trip through a single carrier.