Qatar Airways flying near-empty planes in Australia to exploit legal loophole
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's also funny because by fusing together a bunch of semi-unrelated stories, you end up bizarre combinations. The majority of the article isn't about airlines flying empty flights to keep their slots, it's about Qatar straight up avoiding taking up 'slots' (of sorts), but the call to action is about slot preserving ghost flights.
Finally, it's a completely limp call to action, because the obvious solution (increase carbon taxes) is almost certainly unpalatable to the typical target audience of this article.
I believe that because:
1.) The article presents ‘facts’ that are completely wrong with complete confidence. This alone really seriously smells like an LLM.
2.) Those ‘facts’ are based off of misread quotes from the source pubs. The misreading seems to relate back to words being removed entirely from analysis or else assigned the wrong definition.
I see few signs of human intelligence. What do you think? And for fun, assume the LLM is an adversary. How do we beat it?
No doubt these jobs will give way for LLMs down the road and even as we speak of course
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Australia bans carriers from flying domestic flights to protect their local carriers, but international carriers are allowed to make one connecting flight by treaty all over the world.
Presumably the flights are profitable or they wouldn't run them, but it's Australia's fault that you can't buy a ticket not the airline's fault.
The government is getting the industry protection from international competition that it wanted by banning the airlines from selling flights from Melbourne to Adelaide to fill the seats.
The airline wants to minimize empty seats and the government wants to allow domestic airlines to extract excess profit by protecting domestic airlines from competition but DGAF about empty seats. Therefore it is the governments fault that there are empty seats.
Why not pack the plane and get the sales? I am sure there's a reason (it's too obvious to not have occurred to an airline to sell tickets on a flight) why they think it's not worth it, I am just curious what it is.
Maybe it’s an attempt to avoid drawing too much attention from the regulator? If they started offering internal flights in Australia they’d be stepping even more on Qantas toes.
This is true for Australia, for India, for the USA, for the EU - an airline like Delta can fly to Sydney from LA but not sell domestic flights from Sydney to Melbourne. (Or, for that matter, international flights between Sydney and Singapore)
However, there is a catch! Airliners did not used to have quite the range they do today, and so the treaties allow things like refueling stops. And they (sometimes!) allow passengers to embark/disembark at those stops - but those passengers still have to be flying the international leg, or else it would be a domestic flight.
There's a Wendover video from years ago that's relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thqbjA2DC-E
>I mean, they weren’t even selling tickets [to Adelaide] for the first few weeks. They were taking the p** out of the industry and the laws.”
which implies after the "first few weeks" they were selling tickets
Meanwhile Qantas - a private company, who took over a billion AUD in government support during Covid are expected to pay the outgoing CEO over 20 million AUD in bonuses.
Having flown several times between Qatar and Australia in the last couple years, I don’t think I’ve had a single flight that wasn’t completely booked out. In comparison to the following legs to Europe which have been more like 75% full.
There is a real need for additional capacity on these routes (for those outside of Australia, the gulf countries, Hong Kong and Singapore are the most popular layover countries for Australians travelling to Europe, Africa and Asia due to their location) and the way I see it is that Qatar acknowledge that, tried to buy additional capacity and failing that have had to come up with some creative solutions to work around a government that values a sub-standard flag carriers profits over what’s best for the Australian consumer.
Australia has a very questionable history of this.
For decades imported cars have been hit with heavy import taxes to "protect the Australian Automobile manufacturing industry".
Now that no automobiles are manufactured in Australia (Ford and GM closed their plants), the heavy taxes have not gone away!
There is also the super-controversial "luxury car tax" of 33% on vehicles over approx. $80k. Of course there is no luxury boat tax, luxury plane tax, luxury car tax, luxury watch tax or anything else of the sort.
Tall poppy syndrome, but as legislation. It’s culturally ingrained
A great many security breaches and other errors come about this way, and one cannot automatically assume intent from it happening, though one can ask "what were you thinking?" if the possibility was noticed but dismissed.
With insane regulations, like those that forced airlines to schedule tens of thousands of empty flights to keep their airport slots during Covid?
No, it’s on regulators, not on the industry
>Lufthansa said it ran 18,000 empty flights in the winter of 2021-2022 to ensure it didn’t lose lucrative deals that gave its planes spots at major airports.
Airports and airlines are different industries. The Airports very much want companies to give up slots if they’re not going to fly those routes. As such these regulations are more a compromise between groups than something external.
Of course you can also blame regulators for not being thorough enough (but honestly I would rather blame a lack of carbon pricing here)
I agree that this loophole should be closed, but maybe the way to close it is to just allow flights? I don't have a strong take, the original regulation must have been put into place for some reason; but it has a very real cost (which the passengers are happy to pony up for).
Why? Even if there was a carbon tax, and the carbon tax fully covered the cost of the the carbon emissions, the regulation in question is still actively harmful. It's encouraging resources to be used for no useful purpose, no different than regulation that encourages people to dig holes only to have them be filled back.
This is the problem. Capitalism will always choose “deals” and profit over important priorities like the environment and worker pay, safety, and lives.
I say, instead of less regulation, we nationalize all airline industry. Pull profit out of the equation.
> I say, instead of less regulation, we nationalize all airline industry. Pull profit out of the equation.
Humans do not give a shit about anything other than their own incentives. Yes, even you and me. If you hand control to politicians, people will still act according to their incentives. There is absolutely nothing about capitalism that changes human behavior to be greedy - humans are greedy, whether it be for money or for social status.
For the vast majority of human history, humans have been cooperative and not greedy.
You’re making a spectacular claim without a source.
There’s plenty written on this:
Hilarious since you also made a claim without a source in the prior sentence.
0 - https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...
Capitalism may not change the behavior of a single individual. But does certainly put the greediest to the top of society, and in aggregate you see more greediness among those that have the power to change things.
Wait but is Australia not a democratic government? cue the inevitable "but it's not true [democracy/communism/capitalism]!"
Most people don't want to be assholes. Companies however don't care and most of them are acting as assholes.
At least I don’t have to be a customer of the private sector. Once things are nationalized, the same jerks are running the show based on incentives that are only aligned with their own prosperity, but now impact an entire constituency. Every time you hear a public servant talk about a problem with metrics that make no sense to solving the actual issues, their incentives become more obvious.
2. Companies are also subject to laws and regulations, which are enacted by public servants
Turns out my power to choose to not be a customer gives me infinitely more power over a company than my right to vote gives me over a company.
Anyway, the rule of law should protect individual citizens. Government institutions or officials shouldn't get special treatment or protection. In case they do, then there's your problem. Not with the government entirely, but with the legislative branch (which companies are also subjected to).
I don't care that Jeff Bezos gets better customer service from Amazon than me, or that some senators son can pick up the phone and talk to the head of the IRS. What I care about is that the service I get from the IRS is horrible and the service that I get from Amazon is good.
Personally, last time I needed to call them circa 2016 they were great. I've never had a negative experience phoning IRS.
Removing all incentives is surely gonna make people want to do their best.
You know many counties originally had only a single or two nationalized airline and all of them were such money drains that the governments were all forced to privatize them to keep them afloat.
When you make a regulation that incentivizes these companies to use up slots, they're going to do it simply because they know the competition will also do it, and if they do not, they lose. These rules were poorly planned, as they did not account for the incentives or the unintended consequences in the event that these flights did not actually have to occur. And after this happens, they're attempting to blame businesses for responding to the incentive.
Say I were to go into a crowded room and announce that I will give $10,000 to whoever breaks some specific person's nose. Who's to blame? Yeah, probably some combination of the people who took the money and especially me, who put forward the idea or "deal" that resulted in people taking action when they otherwise would not have done anything like this.
If you think that without capitalism we suddenly would take care of the environment, compare the destruction of the environment in communist countries to capitalist ones. Soviet Russia had a "nuclear lake" they just dumped nuclear waste into, Bitterfeld in the GDR was known for having it's creeks discolored from the chemicals dumped into them, the amount of smoke coming out of old, massive rural Chinese factories is hard to imagine if you haven't seen it; The Trabant spewed out orders of magnitude more exhausted than any western car. The problem isn't capitalism, but resource constraints.
Qatar is state owned.
What you are proposing is for travelers to receive crappy service, no recourse for when the government employees don't feel like working and so on. Why on earth would you want this?
This is scandalous.
So in the end, there would be some bidding, and the cost of those slots would increase to their actual value, which removes the worth of those slots.
It "solves" the problem, but the airline who currently own the slot do not like this solution.
The increased cost would be passed on to the ticket prices of the Melbourne flight. The ghost flight would only be eliminated if the increased prices lower demand enough that the Melbourne flight (including the cost of running the ghost flight after it) becomes unprofitable.
But going back to my OP, I'm not that interested in ghost flights per se. I'm interested in the unnecessary CO2 they emit, and even there, mainly as a symptom of the broader problem of an unregulated, untaxed externality. I think this is the real reason to care about ghost flights.
Someone could also care about ghost flights out of aesthetic opposition to waste or regulatory arbitrage, but I'm not interested in that.
Isn't that relatively normal? I mean I think there are plenty of circumstances where an airline is permitted to fly internationally to a country, but it not permitted to operate (i.e sell tickets for) internal routes.
Cabotage as a whole is pretty unusual outside of integrated aviation markets like Europe. I would be very surprised if Qatar and Australia had an agreement that permitted it. In that absence of such an agreement, it would probably be illegal for QR to sell those tickets.
I've seen multiple instance of memes on social media along the lines of "1000s empty flights. Good thing I recycled that empty tomato can!".
Is it hypocritical? Sure, though I expect he has lots of reasons why it’s not. But is it better than not even giving lip service to the issue? Sure it is. But the fact that action isn’t good enough doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Not fly with a private jet? It is not an unrealistic expectation. Plenty of people manage to not fly with private jets on the regular.
There is the secondary factor of their time being too valuable as well, and having a direct flight to anywhere in the world making a big difference in how much time they spend.
This is just-so reasoning.
Fly commercial instead of private.
this would further absurdly increase the cost of operating a private jet, but billionaires could still afford it.
The intention of many of these campaigns (like paper straws and paying attention to your individual carbon footprint) is, at least in part, to instill the idea that environmentalism should be all about individual action, rather than holding large companies to account for their role in pollution and environmental destruction.
Recycling at a personal level is a good idea—but it can only ever be a small part of a solution, and it also requires that recycling be taken seriously by the places that actually take the recyclables away—that they genuinely recycle the stuff, rather than just sending it to a landfill in some other country.
Here is the guardian story. There are paragraphs about the backlash:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/09/ghost-flights-...
As kind of a general rule, if you see yahoo.com dig for the source publication and then google:
Source_publication + yahoos_title
I was actually taking a Delta flight internationally and they were bumping passengers to make room for additional cargo. Due to the length of the flight and the takeoff weight restrictions that cargo was more valuable than the cheap seats that were paid for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air#Eighth_fre...
If I'm generous with their intentions, Australia were probably trying encourage tourism to smaller cities, bring business to local economies, increase competition on quieter routes, etc. Unfortunately it seems Qatar thought it easier/cheaper to fly the last leg empty instead of marketing tickets to the final destination.
For what it's worth, I actually flew London-Melbourne-Adelaide earlier this year. I booked a separate flight for MEL-ADL since it was cheaper than booking the whole trip through a single carrier.
Airlines exploit their customers, fail to disclose customer rights, and bend laws to their convenience all the time. The public would lose nothing if airlines were not bailed out every time there is a crisis. All the assets: The planes, the pilots, etc. could be subsidized through a crisis and acquired by new airlines and those wise enough to be be to survive a crisis. TBTF and "flag carriers" are welfare capitalism.
If it's not linear, and like 30% capacity is less profitable than both a full plane or a near empty plane, then sure the airline could be abusing policy loopholes. I wonder if the policy penalizes cancellations then? Like what if the airline wanted to cancel these "ghost flights" for the sake of being more green? So they just always canceled the last leg.
For example, one flight from Doha, Qatar, to Melbourne had an additional stop in the Australian city of Adelaide, which was registered as the final destination. Passengers would disembark the aircraft in Melbourne, but a few would remain in the terminal to make the final leg to Adelaide. (...)
In this case, Qatar Airways was making these extra journeys to avoid caps that allow it to make only 28 weekly trips to Australia’s major airports, which includes Melbourne. Landing at Adelaide Airport, which is not among that list, as the final destination enabled the airline to make additional journeys to Melbourne, as there were no limits on flights to non-major airports.