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It's the airport equivalent of a land tax: making people pay for hogging scarce resources is a strong incentive to either use them or sell them off to somebody else who will.

I mean it's not like they were flying passengers regardless.

They would gladly have passengers if the demand was there.

I'm sure this could be worked out using some combination of paying for the slot and requiring a minimum amount of passengers/cargo. Exact numbers would require some tuning by people who know about this but doesn't seem impossible to get right. E.g. have airlines pay a fee for any empty seat below an 80% full plane.

Having planes fly empty to maintain a monopoly is just bad all around

Exactly. Let Lutfhansa spend all its money to fly the empty planes.