Brussels Airlines makes 3,000 unnecessary flights to maintain airport slots
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I remember this issue was in the (german) news for a time in march 2020 when it slowly dawned on everyone that almost all the planes we were watching in the sky were empty - most people had either stopped travelling on their own or were prevented so by travel bans. The airlines were only flying the planes as to not lose the slots.
EU institutions acted reshingly quick in that situation and suspended the rule for some time. After that point, flight traffic in Europe came to a virtual standstill as everyone went into lockdown.
It's a bit disappointing to read that the rule is back in action and apparently with the same results as before.
Or failing a dedicated service for this, is there at least a manual way of finding out which flights are going to be near-empty?
Within a route, it will suggest all the different options to get there. You can judge at a glance how much availability there is by looking at the available seats in the fare buckets. This is for an arbitrary flight from YVR to LHR on Air Canada:
J9 C9 D9 Z9 P9 R0 O8 E7 N3 Y9 B9 M9 U9 H9 Q9 V9 W9 S9 T9 L9 K9 F0
An airline splits its seats into different “buckets”, and the list above is essentially ordered from most to least expensive. J, C, D, Z, P are for business class seats. O, E, N for premium economy, and Y and beyond for economy.
J9 means that there are at least 9 tickets available in the most expensive business class bucket. N3 means that there are exactly 3 tickets available in the least expensive premium economy bucket.
Industry-wide, J means business class and Y means economy, but individual airlines tend to have their own fare coding within there.
So with all of those nuances in mind, you can infer how full the flight is: the second least expensive business class bucket has at least 9 seats available, and the lowest one has 0, so it’s pretty quiet but not empty. Premium economy is probably 50% full. And economy seems to have a lot of space (all but the cheapest bucket have more than 9 tickets).
Conversely, this is a sample of a fairly full flight (today on AC, YVR-YYZ):
J0 C0 D0 Z0 P0 R0 O2 E1 N0 Y4 B8 M6 U6 H5 Q3 V2 W2 G1 S0 T0 L0 A0 K0 F0
Expert Flyer also allows you to review the seat maps for each flight you see, but of course it’s more time consuming, because then you need to click into each option. So it’s best to learn the above syntax, and then use the seat maps to validate. It’s also worth noting that the seat maps aren’t foolproof: many passengers don’t select seats until they check in (because it costs $ otherwise).
Looking at the seat map for my first example above, I was able to validate that business class had 14/30 seats selected, premium economy had 12/21, and economy had ~70/~240 seats selected - lots of open space. A really good chance of having a whole block of seats to yourself.
Also another interesting fact: sometimes you’ll see something like Y3 but the flight is actually sold out. This is how airlines oversell their flights. Y is the most expensive economy fare, often not too far off from a cheap business class ticket - so it’s super profitable. So the airlines will generally keep a couple extra seats available for booking on a full flight. In the best case, a few people miss connections and they’ve pocketed all of that extra money. In the worst case, they need to bump one of the lowest paying passengers and pay them off. But the payoff doesn’t cost the airline much, if anything at all, because then having to do so meant that somebody bought a super expensive ticket in their place.
Which airlines do this? I genuinely think I've never seen the option to select seats while booking.
almost all non-low-cost airlines do this. BA, Iberia, Lufthansa, Air France, United, Delta, Avianca etc etc etc
I’m annoyed on the relatively few trips where the carrier doesn’t allow this.
In the USA there is also a totally different issue, Congressional pork barrel that, e.g., subsidizes a route or even whole airline that serves the interest of a single Congressman so he does not have to take longer routes or fly on limited schedules. There are even famous instances of whole airports being built/funded for that very reason.
I'm sure we'll make this way harder to fix than it needs to be... as we watch that asteroid demolish us.
https://www.transportation.gov/policy/aviation-policy/small-...
https://www.enotrans.org/eno-resources/federal-government-su...
On hand, it provides real benefits
On the other, hard not to see this most benefits the wealthy. I count myself in that benefit
If it really is to provide commercial air access to rural places, unless the "rural places" happen to be near resorts or random rural wealthy people, I'd think anyone making over ~$40k per year in that region would benefit.
The bit to feel mixed about is to what extent we should subsidize people choosing to live in rural areas.
Why not make access based on money? Money is universal. If you pay the airport, you get the slot. If you buy the slot for the month and then don't need it one day, you wasted some of the slot money, but you need not send an empty flight.
Also, it potentially reduces actual passenger numbers, lowering the airport operator's take from duty-free and catering, which I suspect pays much more than the slot fees.
If you made it purely a pay-per-slot system, what would prevent some airlines buying a lot more slots than they need, making air travel more expensive and more painful for everyone?
Given that, the price for how much you charge an airline should take into account how many additional passengers they will bring through their doors. There has to be a price for lower frequency/more spikey carriers, but it is probably a good bit higher and could mean it is better to just run more flights.
If we want to have a testing requirement, I believe there should be some kind of general insurance set up - possibly by the state - to accommodate changes in travel plans due to a positive test result.
Also if a passenger has to fly later due to cancellation, the PCR validity window should be relaxed up to an additional day or two, assuming they are still asymptomatic at the time of the flight. Or maybe a second antigen test taken at the airport should be accepted.
I understand why testing requirements exist, but some balance should be made to make travel dependable, and if the government is going to add additional requirements to travel, it should ensure that all the costs and difficulties are not passed on directly to the citizen.
The other option is that the price of the flight, which should include the damage it does to our planet, gets spread out to the 7 people on the plane.
So they could still fly, but at 20.000$ instead of 200$.
At that point it might be much cheaper for that plane to be canceled and for those 7 people to fly on a smaller private plane at 1000$ per person, doing less damage to the planet.
IMO any environmental damage tax should be required to be passed at least partially to the actual person being transported.
That makes it obvious to the passengers why flying 7 people on a 747 is wasteful.
No it not an option unless you are going to pay the cancellation and rescheduling fees of hotels and other transport for everyone.
So more tax on middle class people?
> IMO any environmental damage tax
So are you prepared to pay higher prices for everything which is transported by fossil fuels, if you keep doing that you will get a revolution, people will just fight and protest and vote out any politician who supports such taxes.
The customer can buy extra insurance for that, or buy a ticket from a company that provides it. Such companies would be very motivated to only offer routes that operate at very high capacity to avoid paying.
> So more tax on middle class people?
How is this "class" dependent?
> So are you prepared to pay higher prices for everything which is transported by fossil fuels,
We are already paying the price for this. Both in cash (e.g. the price of insurance for homes for natural disasters has skyrocketed due to global warming in certain areas), and in a lower future quality of life for yourself and your children.
I'd rather have the people that use fossil fuels pay for them, instead of everybody else.
I get that some people like to travel by plane - i do too - and that sometimes you really want to eat that fruit that has been transported by boat from 20.000km away, instead of buying the food that's available locally. I sometimes like that too.
You seem to think that innocent children should pay with a lower quality of life to allow you to do these unsustainable things cheaply.
I strongly disagree with you here.
Pollution, climate damage, etc. has to be priced in. If that avocado from 5.000km away were to cost 1000 $ instead of 2$ people would think twice about it.
The claim that we shouldn't do this because this only impacts non rich people is flawed. There are many things rich people can do, like buying a lambo, that poor people cannot do. Your claim that poor people somehow have the right to get a lambo, or for that matter, eat avocados, is false. These things are not "rights".
More importantly, it does not matter how much humans talk about climate change, we never want to even face a slight inconvenience to solve it.
That is a good solution.
> we never want to even face a slight inconvenience to solve it
That depends, I would argue that changing flight schedules is not just a slight inconvenience, its more than that.
Are airlines even a big source of co2 emission when you compare it with other sources, we should be tackling the biggest emission sources not the small ones.
I am not an expert but I found this article: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
According to this it looks like passenger aviation accounts for around 1.5% of CO2 produced.
Additionally, according to this article: https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html the climate impact of flights should be considered with a factor of 2-3 times their base carbon emissions, due to additional effects specific to air travel, like nitrous oxide and ozone emissions.
Even at the base rate of 1.5%, that seems high for a single activity no?
Well 1.5% is not too high if you ask me, it would be worth our time and money to tackle other emission sources which contribute 5% or more, not saying we should ignore airlines but forcing delays and harassment to airline travellers is not right.
Once pax have bought tickets, it’s harder to change the schedule without biting the hand that feeds you.
If I book a flight, I'm not getting that money back if I can't fly for any reason. But the airline can just decide "nah, I don't feel like upholding my part of the contract"?
How a contract that allows the company to unilaterally back out supposedly passes those tests in the EU boggles my mind.
I was refunded a flight just last week in the US.
And in Europe, there are laws on the books that the airline has to take care of you if there's an extensive delay. For instance, they have to pay for a meal at the airport if you have to wait for more than a few extra hours, and put you up at an airport if it's going to be overnight or offer a replacement train ticket.
The passenger can’t change their mind and get a refund if they decide they don’t want to fly anymore even if the flight goes on as scheduled.
The airline can change their mind and not provide the flight (and offer refund but that’s beside the point) if they decide they don’t want to fly as scheduled because it’s not profitable for them.
It’s a one sided contract. The airline has my money guaranteed (unless they decide they don’t want it) but I am not guaranteed to have the flight. It’s not about getting refunded if the flight gets canceled.
Perhaps Lufthansa/Brussels Airlines could have used single-engine propeller planes (think Cessna 172 or the many other aircraft in its class) to decrease the cost and environmental impact?
Besides, I suppose keeping a plane in storage and serviced while keeping your workforce certified and ready isn't that much cheaper than keeping all them somewhat flying.
I personally feel the problem is more related to a bogus slot allocation/deallocation policy that forces an airline to fly an empty plane around to hold a slot. Could they not just remove that rather pointless requirement, and have some sort of market based approach to auction slots for a set period (say 1 year at a time)?!
The whole point of the current system is to combat old carriers that had local monopolies and refused to allow competition ( e.g. British Airways at Heathrow). Such a carrier could afford to spend money to prevent competitors from flying from their hubs, making themselves the only ( and thus more expensive) option.
The regulation is good, it just needs more fine tuning ( e.g. they should add a minimal passenger and/or cargo load, to make sure the flights aren't there just to keep the slots and are actually used).
I guess during the last pandemic of this scale, there wasn't really much of an aviation industry.
If you make fuel more expensive tickets will be more expensive and these empty flights will be a quite similar proportion of cost for airlines because the tax is the same with or without passengers.
It wouldn’t be. The massive cost already isn’t stopping it.
If (hypothetically) co2 tax would lead to reduction in other industries but keep emissions unchanged in planes, this is fine.
They let me roll up the arms of the seats in the center and sleep across four seats like they were a bed.
They still did the safety message.
I miss those random low headcount flights :(
It served a purpose so it wasn’t unnecessary after all :-)
I feel like the world is going to keep complaining about energy usage in space if we become a space faring civilization. There are going to be space-environmentalists who will oppose fusion power.
I want to be clear - I want us to move to completely carbon free energy. Green house effect is not going to go away by chipping away at this or that. Some people in CA are telling me to not have kids so that we can keep the climate cool. Ridiculous. But no one dares to even suggest a Manhattan project with extreme urgency to solve this climate problem once in forever.
https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
China is as capable as the rest of the first world to enforce higher standards if not more.
You have plenty of first world countries with a fraction of the US and Canada's per capita emissions.
You need to look within. You guys are very factually just wasteful. The US and Canada are the ones that stand out like a sore thumb among the First world countries. [0]
Only countries like Qatar and Kuwait are more wasteful than the US and Canada in CO2 per capita emissions.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
Edit: added stats, it almost looks bimodal.
>> China has some of the dirtiest air in the world, but a large share of the country's pollutants are generated during the manufacture of goods destined for countries like the United States, according to a new study.
>> about a fifth to a third of China's air pollutants—which include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide—were associated with the production of goods for export, and that about a fifth of those amounts were linked to the production of goods for the United States.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140122-ma...
India's entire CO2 output is less than half that of the United States, by the way, and its per-capita output is one-eighth. [1] (And gods only know much methane is leaking from American wells. We really aren't interested in counting that.) If you're going to put the squeeze on someone, it should be on the latter... But because we aren't going to squeeze ourselves, we deflect, deflect, deflect.
[1] Since it seems to get by on emitting one-eighth what we do, it sounds like there's plenty left to squeeze from our emissions.
>squeezing the last few bits
tell that to .us companies that manufacture in China since 70s
That and getting a PCR test this week in the NYC area seems totally non-functional. Appointments have to be made days in advance, for results which can several days to come back. It's a far cry form Germany where I can get same day service at any number of testing centers, and pay to get expedited results if I need to.
How can these systems be so broken, and why isn't capitalism solving them?
Instead, poorer neighborhoods usually have hospitals or health centers that offer walk-up or drive-through services for vaccinations and tests. Sadly, most of the people in those neighborhoods don't use the services, so if you go right when they open you can get vaccinated or a PCR test with barely any wait. I waited 5 minutes to get my vaccine in Miami, and I waited about 15 minutes in a drive-through in Boston to get a PCR test with results the next day.
COVID tests are completely free, subsidized by the government. You can get COVID tests at very high prices on the "black market". If you don't want to pay those prices, you stand on line at the free testing areas.
Why do you think capitalism is broken here when its working just fine. The supply of testing is too low since its free to take them officially and there is massive demand
All I can tell you is that this week, my Aunt and I were both flying out of EWR. She needed a PCR test for the flight which was supposed to be Tuesday, and she started looking on Friday, but it was almost impossible to find anywhere with an appointment available before Thursday. And even those gave a very fuzzy 1-3 day estimate for results, which is quite unhelpful when you have to take the test within 72 hours of departure.
She spent an entire day trying to find somewhere which would take walk-ins, and eventually found a place through a fiend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who could get her in, although she did have to push the flight back by a day.
From my perspective, this just seemed totally broken. I don't understand how there could not be a vendor, easily discoverable through Google which could deliver same-day or next-day results at whatever price the market would bear, even if it was $300 or $500 or whatever.
It felt like being in a developing country where things just can't be depended on to work properly.
But you're right it is totally broken: they should be auctioning these PCR testing slots to the highest bidder. But of course then there would uproar about "price gouging."
Somewhat similar to how everyone is complaining they can't find PS5s and yet Sony is unwilling to raise topics because the optics would be bad.
(In part, because major manufacturers closed factories and destroyed inventory between spikes. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.htm...)
I'm a bit baffled as to why the Defense Production Act hasn't been utilized more during the pandemic for stuff like this.
This specific scenario has nothing to do with market theory. It's a combination of regulation, subsidization, and infrastructure. We're not buying playstations.
Which of the many governments in the world are you talking about?
Currently that appears not to be the case, and there is no simple and reliable way to guarantee getting a test on time.
This seems to be a market failure, and it is not obvious to me why the market has not stepped in to fill this gap.
And outside of the airport, last time I flew United directed me to some options that were $150, but had results the same day. At least where I live, there are definitely quicker options if you are willing to pay.
Because there's no money in it. We're likely going to have a surge of cases over January (judging by what happened in South Africa). If I'm a test maker/provider, I'm not going to spend a week ramping up production, have the extra tests arrive in two weeks, just do be on the downside of the surge. It's the same reason I didn't build up more capacity in October. There's a vaccine and boosters are starting. Why would I take a gamble on a new variant?
One role of government is to step in when markets fail. We saw test shortages a year ago, and a new variant was an eventual likelihood. The government needed to place the test orders so that the risk didn't get shifted to markets uninterested in that risk. This is almost entirely a failure of government leadership.
To its credit, the US government did a really good job ordering vaccines. It's just handled testing very poorly.
"Capitalism" can't produce new staff instantly at any price when staff are in industries that require substantial training/testing prior to being allowed to work after hiring (or after any long furlough/hiatus of not working, even if they remained officially employed).
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Anyway, you've got a perfect storm of issues.
Airlines have depleted crews from cutting too deeply in the early pandemic. Training/retraining large numbers of people takes lots of time, only so many people are actually qualified to teach or test them.
Airlines were already running what staff they have with as minimal spare capacity as they could get away with to meet demand that's come roaring back far faster than expected, especially for the holiday season. The US is currently running ~83% of 2019 passenger loads (12/20-1/4 passenger count in 2019/20 - 36.6m, 2021/22 - 30.7m), per the TSA checkpoint numbers.
And then....you have a new COVID wave that's leading to substantial portions of the workforce coming down with it and being unable to work for at least a week during their absolute highest load period.
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Are the airlines entirely "not at fault"? No. They cut too deeply in the early pandemic. And they've been too greedy chasing $$$ for renewed demand and added too many flights too quickly, cutting their spare capacity for issues that could crop up to nothing...and now they have.
But the severity of this COVID wave is significantly worse (in terms of # of people infected at once, not referring to illness severity) and pretty much every area of the workforce (that's actually in-person) is having similar issues. Many public schools in the US are basically just functioning as babysitters this week if they're open because they have too many teachers and students out to actually run classes normally.
I’d wager it’s because free markets solve problems not entrenched cronies with political strings.
There are no "take-home" tests with "results in minutes" that use PCR technology.
I was in London and Belfast last week between December 24th and January 1st, travelling from the U.S. (SFO airport)
I had to take a PCR test within 48 hours of boarding, and I had to take a PCR test upon landing in London, and was asked not to leave my hotel room until the results came back -- nearly two days later. They checked my vaccination and PCR test result before I boarded the plane, and passport control at the airport asked to see confirmation that I had a PCR test scheduled.
Before returning from the U.K. to the U.S. I was allowed to take a "rapid" test, but it had to be supervised either in-person or with a "tele-medicine" service that watches you over a video camera.
If I had tested positive, I'd be required to quarantine for 10 days in the U.K.
There was no requirement to test after landing, but I did--three times. NHS gave out rapid tests in "7-packs" and I was able to get 4 packs.
Preparation is a thing. It was quite obvious we were likely to have a covid spike this winter. Anyone without a stock of antigen tests at this point has simply been irresponsible as it was trivial to buy a few boxes at $14/ea at walmart the past 6mo.
Abbott both destroyed unsold inventory (6-7mo from expiration dates) and closed down one of their production facilities they stood up for these tests due to lack of demand over the summer.
If everyone was a "prepper" (no, I don't think having some basic $7 tests sitting in your medicine closet really reaches this point at all, this is called "being prepared" and used to be a civic duty taught to children) the production would not have stopped, and they would not have let 2500+ workers go they are now scrambling to get back.
tldr; production was there, it was ended due to lack of demand. Yes, some (many) folks are in a financial position where $14 is a large expense, but those are outliers and certainly not the folks asking if I have any tests on hand right now.
Not sure if there are proctored PCR versions. They'd have to go in the mail to a lab, but the test proctor could watch you seal it with a uniquely marked seal or something; that should ensure the sample that arrives at the lab is the same as the one you swabbed on camera.
Is there a list exposing such assholery so I can boycott accordingly?
>"The news has prompted the Belgian federal government to write to the European Commission, urging it to rethink the rules on securing slots.
Before the pandemic hit, the rule was that airlines must operate flights in at least 80% of their scheduled take-off and landing slots, or they risked losing them.
This was revised down to 50% after coronavirus broke out, but this still remains much higher than the actual number of flights needed to meet passenger demand."
If only they were the only choice! I would put the fault firmly in the hands of the bureaucrats or the politicians in the EU. This rule made sense pre-pandemic but it should have been adjusted for the current environment to something more like a right-of-first-refusal.
It seems to me these kind of rules have a place, but should be expanded to take slots away from airlines which operate lots of mostly empty flights, not just cancellations.
Of course I do think exceptions should be made for extraordinary circumstances like a pandemic.
Consider, though, that many of these flights are only empty of passengers. A great deal of air freight has always flown on passenger aircraft, much more than on dedicated air cargo flights, and planes without passengers are often flying with full cargo holds.
Florida and Texas have been enjoyable. As AOC knows, no paperwork hassles there.
The classical example of sequential monopolization is a car manufacturer and a local car dealership. The manufacturer wants to sell a large number of cars at a fixed price, while the dealership would rather sell a smaller number of cars so that they can maximize their margin on each sale.
Airports want high numbers passengers to maximize retail/parking/etc revenue (in which they have a monopoly), but don't directly care which flights are more profitable or how much the passengers pay for airfare as long as they fill the airport.
Airlines are maximizing a different demand curve, in which most of their profit comes from a small number of profitable routes while most other flights are slightly unprofitable. Their biggest incentive is to prevent competition on those premium routes, which they can do by monopolizing flight slots.
Sequential monopolization is a high-energy state for a market; absent other forces/regulations, it would be more profitable for the two companies to merge or otherwise form a partnership that looks more like a vertical monopoly.
All that said, we only care about this because of the negative externalities created by the current equilibrium, both in the carbon cost of air travel and the massive taxpayer subsidies for airport construction that are wasted then that airport's takeoff and landing slots are inefficiently allocated.
So, I'd say one possible solution would be to tax the airlines for the carbon used by all flights, perhaps at a penalty rate for flights above some amount of kg-per-passenger-mile.
Why though? I'm not a fan of government intervention in general, but, when the system colludes to accidentally create perverse incentives (flying empty planes) I don't see an issue with the government stepping in to make the situation less perverse (no flying empty planes) while maintaining reasonable equity (right of first refusal seems like a simple solution to that).
Or do you want another round of 737MAX because noone actually flown a plane in 6 months, since it was considered somehow better for enviroment?
I disagree only in that the focus should be at a higher level.
Boeing was so focused on making sure that the 737MAX would be the same type rating as the 737, despite it having very different handling characteristics, that they developed things like MCAS which made it kinda-sorta like a normal 737, the only way that would succeed is if things like "MCAS failure" did not exist and therefore did not require training.
It's not that they didn't properly train people on MCAS, it's the fact that MCAS shouldn't have existed in the first place.
Somehow I think this is actually related to the hours flown. Not entirely, but should we take these chances?
edit: Okay, that was exaggerated. Still, without regular practice the only thing there will be is more of perfectly avoidable crashes.
We cannot trade people lives for some theoretical reduction in emissions.
If we’re talking about practicing for rare events a few hours of simulator time that puts pilots through various crises would be more useful than 100 hours of uneventful flying.