After Coronavirus, Airlines are Flying Empty 'Ghost' Flights in Europe (businessinsider.com) 106
An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider:
Airlines have wasted thousands of gallons of fuel running empty "ghost" flights during the coronavirus outbreak because of European rules saying operators can lose their flight slots if they keep their planes on the ground.
Demand for flights has collapsed across the globe amid growing fears about the outbreak. Under Europe's rules, airlines operating out of the continent must continue to run 80% of their allocated slots or risk losing them to a competitor. This has led to some operators flying empty planes into and out of European countries at huge costs, The Times of London reported.
Demand for flights has collapsed across the globe amid growing fears about the outbreak. Under Europe's rules, airlines operating out of the continent must continue to run 80% of their allocated slots or risk losing them to a competitor. This has led to some operators flying empty planes into and out of European countries at huge costs, The Times of London reported.
Pollution (Score:5, Insightful)
Pollution due to regulations. Wow.
Re: Pollution (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: Pollution (Score:5, Insightful)
The irony is that the regulations come from corporations (so it's really a rule, not a regulation), not government and that due to logistics most of those flights would happen even without the rule.
Re: Pollution (Score:2)
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You could as easily say it's due to lack of regulations. The 80% is an improvement over being at risk of losing their slots at an airport's whim, and therefore having to run even MORE of their flights empty in order to keep those slots.
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Glad to know all the Randian dildos don't live here.
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You mean due to the unwillingness of the airlines to temporarily lower the ticket price to boost demand.
Re: Pollution (Score:5, Interesting)
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You think people only fly for business reasons? I had a couple of flights recently, on the Lufthansa flight I had the whole row to myself. The two Wizzair flights have been as full as always so apparently the low costers don't suffer from the coronavirus fallout. I wonder why.
Re: Pollution (Score:2)
Leisure passengers fly on the low cost airlines, but a lot of business people tend to fly mainline/legacy carriers due to the amenities, extra perks, reliability, and because they aren't paying for the ticket anyway.
Re: Pollution (Score:1)
And low cost airlines are often operated by full service airlines as a cheap brand and code share the same flights.
But the reality is, a lot of companies are requesting that employees self-quarantine after a vacation involving travel. With so many families unable to afford the extra 2-3 weeks off after their vacation they're likely to just not go away.
My business has suspended *all* air travel and I am hearing similar stories from associates in other companies. So business travel has dropped.
I just returned
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Cheap flights are all well and good. Just be careful you budget for the unexpected expense of a 14 day quarantine if you go to or come from the wrong country*.
*Countries subject to change with little/no warning.
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The two Wizzair flights have been as full as always so apparently the low costers don't suffer from the coronavirus fallout. I wonder why.
Could it be the location to your destination? Heck I just flew on a mostly empty plane for a ticket I bought for 30EUR. I mean my anecdote is data. SCIENCE!
But while you're on your completely misguided attempt to explain life around you, you realise that business travel makes up less than 12% of travelers, and that super cheap Wizzair flights make up a small portion of flights compared to full fare airlines as well right? Of course you don't, otherwise you'd not have come to your conclusion.
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Ryanair has by far the largest passenger numbers in Europe. The Lufthansa group is number two, but it consists of ten or so individual airlines, one of them a low coster.
Easyjet is number 5 and carries almost as many passengers as the whole Air France - KLM group. Wizzair and Norwegian are both in the top 10.
You seriously underestimate the size of the low cost airlines compared to the classic national carriers. They carry more passengers than most individual airlines in Europe, fully utilising the open skie
Re: Pollution (Score:2)
In the USA, March and April are spring break. My townâ(TM)s spring break is in about 3 weeks. There are plenty of people that would still be willing to buy cheap flights at the right price.
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You mean due to the unwillingness of the airlines to temporarily lower the ticket price to boost demand.
Some small airports like London City are nearly exclusively business travel. Business travel stops, passengers stop. It is EXPENSIVE TO GET THERE so the airline has to actually PAY someone to fill the seats. No price reduction will make it competitive to other airports for non-business travellers.
Re:Pollution (Score:4, Informative)
You can probably count the amount of these airports on one hand and since London City can only accept small aircraft anyway, the airlines could just as well send a cessna if they absolutely have to keep flying.
Re:Pollution (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean due to the unwillingness of the airlines to temporarily lower the ticket price to boost demand.
I can fly across Europe for 30eur standard fare without even having to resort to special offers. When I can get from Amsterdam to Vienna for less than the cost of dinner in Amsterdam, how much lower do the costs need to actually be to "boost demand"? At that point the damn flight may as well be free and most people won't give a crap.
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The low cost airlines aren't the ones that have to fly empty. My Lufthansa flight FRA-KRK a few days ago cost me 120 euros, not 30.
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The low cost airlines aren't the ones that have to fly empty.
I'm sure you have a detailed study to backup your completely baseless claim. My last flight 10 hours ago from VAL to RTM cost next to nothing and was an almost empty plane too, and unlike Lufthansa cheap airlines don't run hub-spoke systems.
Your assertion that travelers chose their holiday destination based on a cost that would cover 1/3rd of a person in a BnB in a single night is just silly. Air travel in Europe is ludicrously cheap and that hasn't stopped some incredibly busy airports becoming absolute gh
Re: Pollution (Score:2)
With modern airline pricing, giving a crap is an extra fee.
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"Please fly out of Northern Italy. We'll make it really cheap, and you'll only have to spend two weeks in quarantine when you arrive and another three years in prison for breaking the Italian restrictions when you return home."
Just how cheap are you planning here?
Re:Pollution (Score:4, Interesting)
Pollution due to regulations. Wow.
Not just regulation, but also the logistical realities of wanting to take something somewhere, that thing needs to be where you want it too. If you want to catch a flight from Amsterdam to Alicante but the plane is currently in Alicante, it will have to fly back somehow to pick you up.
Also these planes aren't empty. You can bet your arse they are carrying some amount of cargo.
Welcome to the reality of a cut-throat industry with very small profits. The cost of losing your slot is higher than the cost of flying an empty plane.
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The vast majority of travel is two-way (you eventually want to get back home). One-way trips are relatively infrequent, and tend to cancel each other out (your one-way flight from Amsterdam to Alicante, is statistically balanced out by someone else's one-way flight from Alicante to Amsterdam). So the plane's flight from Alicante to Amsterdam to pick you up, is f
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The vast majority of travel is two-way (you eventually want to get back home).
Indeed it is two way, and thanks to the rise of apps like Skyscanner, competition in airlines and the increasing number of small airports the way there and the way back is quite often booked through different airlines and increasingly to completely different airports at either end.
But that's completely beside the point. You seem to be focused on this idea that we're talking about passengers rather than planes. The idea that trips are two way is precisely *why* airlines can't just arbitrarily ground a plane
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Sure, it's two way, but they don't just park the jet and fly you back on it a few days later. As soon as you leave, a cleanup crew goes through it than it gets loaded up for the next flight. And it has to make that flight since as soon as it gets cleaned up there, it's due to leave for somewhere else.
Next up, the rule to make 80% of flights or lose the slot is NOT a government regulation. It is a rule made by private companies hired by the airports to allocate capacity. They want as much of that capacity a
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Well, not exactly. There is no regulation that says the airlines *have* to do this. What's going on is that the rules for allocating a scarce resource don't take into account a rare situation where that resource is slack.
But it's true that *actual* regulations have unintended consequences. That's not an argument against regulation, it's an argument for weighing the consequences of regulation carefully.
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Pollution due to regulations. Wow.
They're not *required* to fly, they just risk losing their slots if they don't. There's actually a difference.
This is pollution due to capitalism.
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Air New Zealand just sold a single daily slot at London Heathrow for $27Million - thats how valuable these slots can be. And if you lose them with no remuneration due to lack of use, then thats a huge asset just lost to the company no "just" about it.
Re: Pollution (Score:2)
They should not be allowed to sell their slots. They should operate on a use it or lose it basis, with âoelostâ slots going up for auction on a quarterly basis.
Lose your slot, then buy it back if you want it.
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Good luck with that, slots are commercially valuable things for both the airport and the airline. Theres no good reason to change that either.
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Nope, the article is misleading, it says "rules". These aren't regulations, these are rules set by the airports that state if flight slots aren't used they'll hand them to someone else.
This is wholly a private sector problem, not a government problem.
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There are other rules in play as well here - if an EU airline cant provide a service because of an out-of-place aircraft, then they now owe compensation to all the passengers that were on that flight under EU261 rules. Which, depending on the distance the flight was supposed to travel, could be a full refund plus 600 Euros per passenger. Thats an expensive payout for an airline, so they fly repositioning flights to ensure that doesnt happen.
So yeah, the "government" is also involved here.
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Re: Pollution (Score:1)
Sure about that? Many if not most larger airports aren't privately owned, and if they are, they're operating on a government granted lease (and have a local monopoly), effectively being an agent of the government. Governments benefit directly and indirectly from the bid wars on routes.
Re: Pollution (Score:1)
Re:Pollution (Score:5, Insightful)
What regulation would that be? The slots are governed by corporations contracted by the airports to allocate capacity. It is not a government regulation. Perhaps there should be a regulation, but honestly, this is a rare enough event that it may be best to leave it as-is.
The airlines aren't clamoring for an exception since they would be making most if not all of those ghost flights anyway for logistical reasons. They simply don't have the ability to make wide ranging changes without the whole thing coming down around them. The ghost flight has to happen because the plane and crew will be needed at the destination to make another flight that they have already committed to.
If you want to blame this on something, it'll have to be the corporations that were unable to anticipate this soon enough to adjust the logistics appropriately.
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That's a pretty desperate stretch to try to turn this into bal ol' gubermint.
It also ignores the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of a 3 paragraph reply.
Re: Pollution (Score:2)
Pollution is waste, there is an inherent capitalist reason to reduce it and the whole reason the US has reduced their pollution the most in the last few decades.
Regulation breeds inefficiencies. Why would flight companies lose their slot as long as they keep paying for it? It's just an artificial price control. There are tons of airports, bus and train stations across Europe that have continuous ghost traffic, even during non-emergencies because regulations demand all areas are serviced some minimal amount
Re: Pollution (Score:3)
HUH? Is that why every rail line on a train system have different sized rails? Or houses all have different sized doors? Or not enough fire exits in commercial buildings? Or no one is servicing an airline route half the year because it's not tourist season even thou said airline has booked the route, preventing others from using that limited air lane?
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Re: Pollution (Score:2)
But they are still within standards and regulations. You can find 20" single door way entrances (not closet doors)... but these are considered out of compliance with regulations. And commercial spaces have even more regulations. Try and do a restaurant with a front or back entrance smaller than 32".
And certainly the regulations themselves don't create or foster doors of every conceivable size between 20 and 48. Which is the topic of this thread.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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bizarre counterproductive insistence that insurance companies be profit-seeking
There is no such requirement. My insurance company is Kaiser Permanente, a non-profit.
Re: Pollution (Score:2)
Barmy (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what happens when regulators make rules too rigid and they did not think of unusual situations.
In programming terms this would be called a bug and probably fixed. I hope that this is fixed. It is not the first time that this has happened, I remember reports of it some time ago.
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In this case, you just suspend the regulations as long as the emergency persists. Problem solved.
Considering the number of times someone in power has said "We know this is stupid, but we can't do anything about it, because it's a regulation" in the last decades, I would probably assume that we have reached a state of bureaucratic madness where it is impossible to suspend such regulations.
Re:Barmy (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh really? Then why are programmers expected to consider every possible thing that could happen when making software?
Re: Barmy (Score:2)
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They're not. Mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers are. That's why OSes crash but bridges stay up. I'm a programmer and we are allowed to be lazy as fuck compared to real engineers.
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You cannot possibly consider every possible thing that could happen when crafting regulations.
I expect regulators to consider at a bare fucking minimum the the entirety of the 'low hanging fruit' of 'things that can happen'
If you fucking don't, fuck you.
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This is what happens when regulators make rules too rigid and they did not think of unusual situations. In programming terms this would be called a bug and probably fixed. I hope that this is fixed. It is not the first time that this has happened, I remember reports of it some time ago.
Normally they fly because the plane/crew is needed elsewhere, so much disruption they risk losing a flight slot is probably extremely rare. Also, this is the kind of fault I very strongly refuse to call a bug. You made a rule, the rule was faithfully implemented and the failure to account for extreme circumstances is all yours. This is the way the business side always tries to weasel out of their mistakes by acting like every shortcoming or unintended consequence is a bug. If it's not a discrepancy between
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In programming terms this would be called a bug and probably fixed.
No it wouldn't. In programming terms this would be called "by design" and tagged with WONTFIX despite user complaints. Don't for a moment think that programmers magically accommodate edge conditions they didn't design for.
It is not the first time that this has happened, I remember reports of it some time ago.
And it won't be the last because the cost of this occurrence is smaller than the payoffs enjoyed by fixed schedules and ability to prevent competitors running your route when the system is functioning normally. A classic case of WONTFIX because if you notice no one in the industry is actua
Re: Barmy (Score:2)
So if the requirement was "Background must always be the Company blue." You would consider the fact that it didn't change to pink on Valentine's & Pink Ribbon Day to be a bug?
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If it is not in the "specs for the background" no.
And where I live backgrounds don't switch to pink on valentines day (we actually don't have one) or on gay parade.
Re: Barmy (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure it would be called a bug, more like an edge case.
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It is barmy. It is also not true. the slots are controlled by independent bodies for each country. The ACL in the UK is perfectly capable to postpone the rules under these circumstances and in fact for certain international slots it seems they did.
This is just more baseless anti EU FUD from our hopefully soon to be ex-members the UK.
Rules are there to be changed (Score:5, Interesting)
It should be easy to change the rules temporarily to say "up until further notice, you don't lose slots for not flying flights".
Re: Rules are there to be changed (Score:3, Insightful)
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So the solution is EUxit?
Re: Rules are there to be changed (Score:1)
Brexit?!? You are comparing to a country that took 4 years to say "Yeah, we are leaving." after stating such 3.5 years ago and begging for multiple extensions to decide?
A country that basically ended up going with the first plan that May made (transition till Dec 2020). But during this time, flip flopped the political parties in power & replaced PMs. A country where a woman had more balls to lead than all the men in the Party.
They are at the same spot as originally planned 2.5 yrs ago, but without the
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Re: Rules are there to be changed (Score:2)
I wasn't playing stupid as I was clearly talking about their govt; not the people.
But let's bring the "People" in shall we? The ones who voted to give a directive to leave, voted for a govt that would make that happen, didn't punish any of their officials who said they would but ran away from leading it , then voted to weaken that govt, and then voted again to strengthen that govt.
And in the end, they ended up with a worse plan than the lady that was initially leading it that everyone hated and rid
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But the UK, you know, LEFT?
The UK, with the most stupidest government for decades (which people voted for because they didn't want a government acting intentionally stupid) managed to change the rules to get some desirable outcome.
They left, so what? Is your logic that the UK left the EU, so if the UK government does something clever, the EU must avoid doing clever things at any cost?
Re:Rules are there to be changed (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be easy to change the rules temporarily to say "up until further notice, you don't lose slots for not flying flights".
Every time you think something is easy you need to consider the impact of what you're saying. Some examples:
-Flight schedules need to be updated
-Maintenance schedules need to be updated
-Planes may no longer be where they are needed and instead stuck in ports without passengers.
-Staff may no longer be where they are needed to fly the planes, or better still be separated from where they live because a return flight had no passengers.
There's nothing easy about suddenly adding some dynamics to a fixed system with so many moving parts.
Also:
As an example, the UK government just changed the rules for statutory sick pay, because we didn't think sick people deserved pay and instead incentivised them to go to work like they do in the USA against the common good of the whole economy, we are after-all backwards like that
FTFY.
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That doesn't refute a thing the OP said. It would still be easy to change the rules.
Maybe an airline will decide it's just easier to eat the cost of flying around empty planes rather than handling all of those logistical changes. That would be up to them, but they might have to worry a bit if their competitors are a bit more flexible and efficient. But whatever happens, they won't be able to point to the rules and say "not our fault".
I'd be very happy if I could read the article (Score:2)
but I can't because it's not an AdBlock friendly site. So FUCK 'EM.
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I could read OK, but I'm using ublock origin these days rather than adblock.
Not in Finland... (Score:2)
Flew 4 flights in and out of HEL this week and all were quite full. Granted, I wasn’t headed to northern Italy, Wuhan, or Iran, but still...
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Half to Asia, half Shengen. Amazed how many Japanese were flying through, but I guess it is a logical intercontinental routing.
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Flights are all over the place. I was on a full flight to Valencia on Wed, and a mostly empty flight back today. Dusseldorf airport is a frigging ghost town compared to what it normally is this time of year.
Shades of Gulf War I (Score:2)
Is it that fucking hard to ask for an exception? (Score:2)
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Who wants the exemption and to what end? Pilots and crew being in the wrong place, planes being in the wrong place, maintenance schedules going out of whack. The airlines aren't asking for exemptions.
Turns out, yes it's hard. (Score:2)
Let's start with the basics ... who do you ask? Which government agency is responsible for coordinating international slot allocation at airports?
I actually looked into this, and it turns out the answer is "none". Slot allocation is managed by private companies as a service to the airports, and governments have to petition these private companies to change their rules [twitter.com].
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^^^MOD UP^^^
So everyone here rending their garments should be complaining about the horrible inefficiencies of corporations and demanding regulation.
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Upset Now? (Score:2)
Anything environmentally harmful like this (Score:2)
Just another EU hate post (Score:4, Funny)
How retarded are you guys that you believe this bullshit?
This is an "act of nature beyond control" ... of course they can cancel flights without consequences, especially as EVERY AIRLINE is affected.
Why this comes on /. is beyond my comprehension.
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of course they can cancel flights without consequences
I'm not sure if you have no idea as to the nature of the airline industry or flat out have no idea what is even being discussed.
Why this comes on /. is beyond my comprehension.
Because it's reality, it's complex, it's technical in nature and it's news. I don't know why you think the complex nature of airline scheduling and transportation and the realities of being unable to arbitrarily stop flights is some hit piece on the EU, but given the discussion that is happening here in comments it looks like quite a nice story that Slashdot readers fell is worth d
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There is no one in the EU who cancels a flight slot for an Airline because the plane can not fly due to act of higher force.
If one believes otherwise he has no common sense.
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Nonsense, anti EU FUD and bad journalism. (Score:1)
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No near empty flights allowed would be the good EU nation news...
This is what contingency plans are for! (Score:2)
Now for the crappy airlines that didn't plan for this type of problem --Tough Luck!
Not MY Problem!
It's Your Problem. Please leave me alone. Please Stop "stirring up shit"!
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Dumb story (Score:1)
This happens all the time even in the best of times. Airlines have routes and logistics for their equipment. What happens if scenarios. So say you're at Heathrow and you want to go to Paris. Ok, nobody wants to go to Paris. You want to go to Rome. There is a scheduled flight to Rome. In order to meet that schedule the air plane has to be there. Same for the 12:00, 3:00, 6:00 flights. Likewise all the other airports. So if you don't fly your 12:00-Rome then the plane isn't in Rome for that flight's next leg,
Hmmm.. Having just flown from Europe (Score:2)
I find this interesting. All my flights were booked solid and we are talking March 7th. The airports were jammed packed and the passport control was long lines.
None of the flights had been changed as I booked at least a month before so.. I am not sure where this empty is happening?