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.