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Comment by TheDudeMan | Hacker News Reader

Sending a flight that unexpectedly turns out to be nearly empty is different from scheduling a flight that you know will be nearly empty. The latter would only happen due to wrong incentives. In this case, it sounds like the problem is that access to airport slots is based on how many flights you run or the consistency thereof.

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.

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A pure-cash system provides incentives for incumbent carriers to buy (scarce) slots and leave them empty to limit competition. British Airways would definitely do this at Heathrow if allowed, for example.

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.

Perhaps you could add a clause “if you don’t fly the slot, then you pay most of what you would have spent on the flight”—high enough to ruin the perverse incentive, but low enough to encourage not making the flight unnecessarily. And perhaps an arrangement that most of the surplus goes to some charity or other.

They should auction the slots every month. There should be no grandfathering or other incentive to hoard.

Slots for the next month? People book flights months in advance.

That could end up raising the cost of flying

Fine. Air travel is already way to subsidized, especially given our current climate emergency.

That’s the point. The cost of flying currently does not account for the damage that planes do to our planet.

I think that is anti-competitive and if it isn’t illegal already it ought to be.

The reason you would regulate something like this is because airport capacity is a huge bottleneck for air travel where demand always outstrips supply, and every flight which doesn't run creates a massive opportunity cost for a flight which would have otherwise served a lot of real travelers.

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?

Overbook the slots. It's fair, because airlines overbook their seats.

If I had to guess the airport doesn’t make money just off of the flights, they also provide general services to passengers. Having a 30 person flight come through might net them parking, drinks, duty free revenue as well. Even some of the aero revenue like fuel or jet bridge usage are dependent on the number of flights.

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.

Were that the case, they should still prefer money to an empty plane taking up their traffic controllers/tarmac/etc.

The controllers and tarmac have to be there whether the flight flies or not.

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