The ‘ghost flights‘ are very polluting and expensive empty planes. Lufthansa threatens to fly 18,000 of these flights because of European airport regulations, based on the distribution of ‘slots’.
Professor Pere Suau-Sánchez explains in the video that it is a method to manage the capacity of congested airports, time slots that are distributed among the airlines so that they can take off, land, or use the airport infrastructure.
They are based on 80-20 rule, known as ‘use it or lose it‘. What does it mean? What a company has to comply with minimum with 80% of your operations in that strip if you want to keep it.
The president of the Airline Association (ALA), Javier Gandara, comments that the pandemic meant that there was not enough demand to reach that 80%, so the European Commission made the rule more flexible to a 50-50.
This figure is insufficient for airlines such as Lufthansa o Brussels Airlines, who claim to have canceled 33,000 flights because of the uncertainty of omicron. Although in response to laSexta, they assure that their flights they would go “almost empty”, not empty, something that is not profitable for them.
The recovery has come first to low-cost companies, which benefit from maintaining the current percentage of operations. The European Comission has had to intervene, making it clear that European Union rules “do not oblige airlines to fly to keep empty planes in the air.”
They settle the discussion in this way, but open the debate on an effective system in the pre-pandemic, but not very flexible in the current reality.
Mario Twitchell is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his insightful and thought-provoking writing on a wide range of topics including general and opinion. He currently works as a writer at 247 news agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
