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Comment by mjbeswick | Hacker News Reader

Aircraft are very expensive to operate, so it's unlikely that aircraft are being flown without good reason. It also depends on what the definition of "empty", as an aircraft is never empty, as it always have a crew. There are many small aircraft at Farnborough.

What about cargo planes, as they no not have passengers!?

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"Empty" means with no passengers. That should be obvious. Defend millionaires and their private jets if you like, but don't hide it by twisting words.

Typical empty flights are to move a private/corporate jet. The plane flies someone to Brussels, flies back empty, flies someone else to Edinburgh, flies empty to Brussels, brings the person back, etc.

This airport doesn't have bulk freight flights. They mention "time-sensitive logistics", which is presumably the private jet version of using FedEx etc, and bottom of their list of activities anyway.

This is bad, but the right way to fix it is by taxing empty flights or better CO2 emissions per-flight, not by targeting the proxy metric of “flights from this one airport”.

Would the mega-rich pay extra if they needed to? Sure. At the margin they would fly less, and you could use the tax revenue to buy CO2 offsets or invest in infrastructure projects that will have the same effect like renewable energy generation.

Farnborough is ridiculously expensive for small aircraft. Not just expensive like for example Amsterdam Schiphol which is about 10x more than a small airport, but 10x more expensive than even Amsterdam. It's really a private jet only kind of place.

>to shuttle dogs and their owners to Dubai and back.

You can't get much more essential than that.

>it's unlikely that aircraft are being flown without good reason

You mean like picking up a billionaire?

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