Hacker News Reader

Comment by noinsight | Hacker News Reader

Because on the flip side, airlines could keep canceling flights on less popular routes when they're not at full capacity (i.e. not/less profitable). That would inconvenience passengers. Under this regulation they could lose that route to a competitor that is more willing to service customers (or can operate at a lower cost).

EDIT: I found the EU page outlining the regulation here: https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/air/airports/slots_en

EDIT 2: This appears to be a global practice: https://www.iata.org/en/policy/slots/

View on HN

Another reason springs to mind: if airports are congested - as they probably are - if an airline continually wastes allocated take-off/landing slots by not actually using them, the whole airport becomes less efficient and those precious slots could have been better used by someone else. This disincentivizes doing that. I'll leave why someone would hog slots they have no intention of using as an open question.

I don't think airlines do hold on to slots that they have no intention of ever using in practice - they tend to sell the slots in those circumstances.

What they do do though is hold onto slots at congested airports that they perhaps don't have a use for until a few weeks/months down the line.

Mandating flights seems like a bad solution to carriers canceling flights unilaterally. Why not just force them to provide comparable alternate arrangements and/or pay the passengers financial compensation?

It's not about the passengers, it's about parking space for the planes.

You not taking off means someone else can't land.

If that's really the issue, why are they constantly making ghost flights? Surely there are places to park planes in bulk (eg. same place where they're parking all the 737 MAX)

Parking planes in bulk isn't the issue here. Planes are expensive and nobody wants to mothball them, they want them at airports.

> Surely there are places to park planes in bulk

No, there aren't for airliners. Most are in the air at any given time.

There's boneyards and mfg. airports, and that's about it.

A possibility would be a non-operating airport in a friendly country - thinking about the new Berlin airport.

Boeing likely finally stopped making the 737 MAX after they ran out of parking space, which forced a decision.

To park even one airliner long-term requires prior permission and monthly payments.

I have no knowledge on this topic, but weren't most/all *US flights grounded during the 9/11 attacks?

It involved flooding various airports (especially in Canada) with planes that were already in the air destined to USA, others ended up diverting inside USA, generally lots of congestion and abnormal parking.

Slots are used to regulate congestion in normal conditions.

We ended up having to do this during 9/11. I don't know if there are relatively more or fewer planes than then now, but I do remember that many/most airports had Jets parked on the runways and we're nearly all of their taxi- and runways for storage.

> Surely there are places to park planes in bulk (eg. same place where they're parking all the 737 MAX)

Not if the 737 MAXes are hogging all those spots, of course.

The flights aren't mandated, the airlines can not fly them if they want. But if they don't they may lose them to another airline willing to fly them. If nobody wants to fly the route, then there's no threat of losing it to a competitor.

> Because on the flip side, airlines could keep canceling flights on less popular routes when they're not at full capacity (i.e. not/less profitable).

This would lead to them getting fewer customers as they got a name for awful reliability, like Alaska Airlines have a reputation for being assholes from top to bottom, or United have a reputation for destroying musical instruments.

If you want to more directly disincentivise cancelling flights when people have booked already set a minimum payment to the affected passengers, as in the V EU.

Alaska Airlines have a reputation for being assholes from top to bottom, or United have a reputation for destroying musical instruments

As a frequent flyer on both airlines, I'm not sure that either of those reputations exist, at least I've never heard them. I vaguely remember some incident with a broken guitar (?) But I couldn't tell you which airline.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Breaks_Guitars

United Breaks Guitars

This rule says it's ok to squat on slots just as long as you burn fuel while you do it.

Yes — because such behaviour results in losses for the company and, if sufficiently extreme (i.e., pushing them to bankruptcy) is self-correcting (they leave the market and vacate the slots).

Why not create a competitive market for slots, rather than incentivising people to literally burn fuel?

Because (as is argued elsewhere in this thread), large airlines could buy up all slots and then not operate flights on them, starving their would-be competitors of opportunity to create a basis for themselves.

But they could just do the same with the current ruling - the only difference would be whether they spend their money on more expensive slots or on wasting fuel.

No. There are multiple levels of regulation.

Internationally the rule is that you can have "slots" if your airport is busy enough. IATA classifies airports into three levels with only the busiest class 3 "Co-ordinated" airports having slots. A relatively small number of generally very globally important airports qualify, very few of them in the US - but of course these seem notable because you've heard of them. My local airport (which is a ghost town because the airline that ran most flights from there recently collapsed) does not have slots. If you had told them last year you wanted to take off and land six planes a day there they'd just say that sounds great, let us know when to expect them and where to send the bills. London Heathrow on the other hand obviously doesn't have capacity to just have you show up with six extra planes and not cause chaos.

But, the international rule doesn't say how you get slots. IATA organises conferences to discuss strategy, but it's completely legal for, say, Russia to decide that all slots in its major airports are for Russian companies. The EU has its own regulations which say if you're a EU member state with an airport that gets slots, you must meet certain EU criteria that aim to create a competitive marketplace, keep unsafe carriers out of European airspace and make everything efficient.

The UK implements those regulations through a private company because of course it does the Tories (party presently in government) love private companies, and that's what Airport Coordination Limited is for.

Anyway, the EU level regulation means you can't "just" buy more slots, you need to qualify to even be allowed them. If Big Airline A buys Small Airline B, it would not be unusual for the rules to say that too bad, the resulting company still named Big Airline A doesn't get all the resulting slots, some of them must be auctioned off to competitors.

There is such a market. It's just that in some cases, it can be economical for an airline to hang on to an unused slot at cost in the short term if it expects the slot to be profitable in the longer term.

You can just fine the companies rather than incentivising them to run empty planes.

Better yet, institute a proper carbon tax and either a carefully thought-out market for slots and/or fines.

Fines are not a solution. When you hear about fines, it is typically some government trying to save face on the media:

- The collected fine will not be used to undo the damage to the market/competitors.

- The fine won't ever exceed the profits gained by the company because of the infringement. Or else the company will contest it as unfair.

That's why you read "EU fines Google with 5 billion" and Google doesn't really care. They will go through the moves of pretending they care, maybe try to shave off part of the fine, but at the end of the day, it's business as usual.

Sounds like the solution then is to just make the fines more severe.

5 billion might be an acceptable loss for Google. 50 billion might not be.

The whole point of the rule is that it's more expensive to not run the flights than to run them with few passengers. So the fine would need to be higher than the cost of operating the flight resulting in the exact same outcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com