I bought a jfk sfo ticket last week. By Sunday, Delta had lopped off almost all of the transcontinental service, had eliminated red eyes, and replaced most planes with a220s, which are the smallest main line jet they use.
I will be flying from east US to Germany this weekend. (Planned move and visa is running out so no choice).
So far I'm the only person on the transatlantic plane.
Interestingly enough the local US-US flight seems to still have a lot of passengers on it (50ish%)
How do you know that? Seatmap are not a reliable indicator - I made this mistake once to board a full flight to India (idea was to save on assigned seat) - many people booking will not be assigned a seat until checkin. The information your OTA or bespoke corporate travel agent has is no different to expertflyer, seatmap bad indicator and for availability you'll only see a max of 9 in each bucket..
Empty transatlantics aren't unheard-of. I was one of only two passengers on a Lufthansa MUC-EWR last year.
It's better for them to run highly unprofitable flights than miss their contract obligations with big corporations that want a plane available to move people transatlantic on a day's notice.
> Interestingly enough the local US-US flight seems to still have a lot of passengers on it (50ish%)
That's probably a mix of people with critical jobs needing to travel, people having to move for a variety of reasons, and people listening to the ignorant and ignoring the advice to social distance.
Probably. As far as I can see from the airport website this is a regular flight leaving a few times a day. Right now it appears to fly once every other day.
In 2011 I took a flight to Boston which happened to be on the same day that William and Kate got married. I don't know if that was the reason, but the flight was almost empty (apparently under 30 passengers on a 737). It was annoying for a couple of reasons: Firstly they didn't upgrade anyone, even though first and business was basically empty. Secondly, the flight attendants were constantly badgering me in case I wanted something, when really what I wanted was a bigger seat and to be left alone. Anyway, good luck on your 1 passenger flight.
They can't upgrade people on an empty flight without upsetting the balance of the plane. I've been on flights where we didn't leave the gate until people downgraded so the front wasn't overfull. (I was the only person flying economy, first and economy plus was full so everybody was in front of the wings)
I'm having trouble believing that the margins are so close that the position of a 200lb mass on a 68000 lb plane is a significant factor in anything. If true it would suggest that using the lavatories would be a significant event requiring coordination with the stewards and pilot.
30*150 = 4500 lb. There are cases of planes crashing because everyone rushed to the front or the back to avoid smoke.
I know it's not the same as a commercial airliner, but I used to teach hang gliding on the beach and we'd sometimes get a little packed sand in the back of the keel (which is the name for the central bar that the wings were mirrored across). The total weight of the student plus the glider could get up to ~280 lb, and the amount of packed sand would be less than a pound or two, but the flight characteristics of the gliders would change drastically, to the point where we could barely get them in the air.
As another commenter notes below, the few people moving around the cabin is less about control ability and safety than it is about fuel efficiency.
Actually, for center-of-gravity reasons they (often) cannot reassign seats freely, as the aircraft gets balanced based on the assigned seats. If everyone moves up front, the pilots might get a surprise in how the plane reacts.
I think this is actually not the case. A Boeing 737 totally empty and in the smallest possible configuration is 61,864lbs. If 20 people move up to 1st class that is less than 7% of the overall weight. With the engines and fuel in the centerline, that represents even less in terms of overall torque change on the center of gravity. The aircraft would adjust for this with the tiniest of movements on the elevator, so small it very well might be in the hundreds of an inch.
Moving people left and right has absolutely zero effect on the controlability of the plane, because the ailerons can compensate for much larger movements than that. What it might have an effect on, though, is the overall efficiency with which the plane flies. It is more efficient to have the center of lift and the center of gravity matched, than not.
Here is an example for an A320neo where LH seems to have resolved the issue by not booking the last row due to GoC issues [1]. So 6 people can make a difference.
>Firstly they didn't upgrade anyone, even though first and business was basically empty.
They rarely upgrade to international first/business because the meals and other perks cost real money. And it'll piss off the people who payed over a thousand dollars for those seats.
If you ask, they'll almost always say yes. Something like, "Hey, I noticed the flight is mostly empty. Would it be possible for me to get a complimentary upgrade to one of the empty first class seats?"
Unlikely. There are different crew for different cabins. When a flight departs without anyone in first, for example, they don't normally bump people up to fill it they redistribute crew into the main cabins.
Now, if you fly regularly and have some miles status with that airline you can request all sorts of things. The gate agent has a lot of leeway in that regard.
One of the conditions of the relief money the airlines took was to maintain reasonable service to their existing US destinations. Another was to protect jobs through the end of September.
So yes, the planes are empty, but September is the timeframe to watch.
Takes a deep breath: can anyone explain how costs of maintenaning a fleet like that on the ground, would way up against flying empty? At what point would it make sense to "mothball" airplanes for longer term storage?
Mothballing a plane is quite hard. For parking it a few months you would need to secure the engines and regularly run things like hydraulic systems etc. The batteries are really not designed to sit still, so it's best to take those out and connect ground power to operate systems once in a while.
Maintenance costs are based on different schedules, there is usually a time limit (as in calendar time), a flight time limit and a cycles limit (a cycle is one take-off + landing). Which one is more limiting depends on the type of operation the plane was designed for, A long-haul plane is designed for more flight-time vs cycles, a regional jet is designed for a high cycle count. So maintenance costs will decrease if you keep them on the ground, but some components may then "time-out" which will still incur maintenance costs to bring them back to airworthy condition.
Can any recent airline passengers comment on whether airports are using the reduced volume to enforce social distancing in customs, boarding, and TSA lineups?
I flew back from Mexico mid-March and going through the sweaty scrum unmasked felt a bit like being in Brunner's _The Sheep Look Up_.
Honestly, it seems like a great time to reconsider our impact on the planet: All the things the naysayers claimed were impossible and could never be stopped or changed have been shut down in the span of less than a month.
Well. Not everything is shut down without consequence. Many things have definitely surfaced as not being so hard after all, like killing the commute and working from home.
Perhaps in software, it's not clear what productivity impact there is.
However many people are furloughed and laid off. Sales aren't being made, which means money isn't coming in. To pretend that the current situation is "not so hard" betrays your privilege.
There are many jobs outside of software that have had resistance to working from home for really no good reason. I was really just trying to balance my comment anyway, working from home was the first example that came to mind. My main point that there will be consequences to shutting many things down, even if it seems like it was quite easy.
It's an excellent time -- climate change is a much greater danger to us all than covid19 has been or will be. The economical consequences of climate change will also be much bigger than covid19 on the longer haul.
And many of the results of covid19 on society are the same as what must be done to combat climate change.
Covid19 has shown that extreme measures are possible if people actually believe in the consequences. It is also a good case that early prevention could have saved a lot of economical loss later on when the issue has grown too large to be ignored any longer, just like with climate change.
Many flights around the world that are continuing to carry cargo
For example
"The number of cargo-only flights at Heathrow has surged to five times normal levels, with the airport now saying it is prioritising medical supplies as passenger travel grinds to a halt."
So you're saying "flights running empty for legal and regulatory reasons are running empty for legal and regulatory reasons"
There may be some that are, although this article says the flights are upto 10% full. Given the average car is only 20% full that doesn't sound a terribly low amount.
The article also says
* One reason to keep so many flights going is to help the airlines implement their policies that promote social distancing
* Some travel is essential and it’s important that people who truly need to travel by air retain a way to do it.
It then goes on to say that many of the "13 Washignton-Boston flights" will be cancelled. Indeed of the 10 arrivals currently listed on [0], 5 have been cancelled.
Airplanes are not as bad for the climate as the activists want you to believe. Overall they're only a few percent of emissions. Much much more is from other transport (shipping, cars), industry and residential use. Somehow there is an overly large focus on airplane pollution, but mathematically that focus really doesn't make much sense.
My understanding is that research suggests airplane emissions make a disproportionate contribution to the climate crisis because they are released at high altitude, but I'm not an expert.
Also, it seems intuitively obvious that moving N kg by plane is vastly less efficient than other forms of transport like rail or ocean shipping. We should be doing fewer energy-inefficient things and more efficient things.
Also, only the world's richest (who have by far the largest carbon footprints) fly today. The comparatively small sliver of emissions it is today will balloon as the world gets richer.
Rail is more environmentally friendly than air, but it lacks capacity and it's not very fast. Ocean is much worse for the environment than air, because emissions from shipping aren't regulated and they burn the worst of the worst while happily dumping waste overboard once in international waters. At least air has global rules on clean operation set by IATA since a few years.
"A few percent" of global emissions is positively massive.
According to wikipedia, Germany's economy (GDP $3.863T) is only about 4% of global economy (GDP $87.265T). Would you call Germany's economy insignificant?
More interestingly, there are only three nations (the US, China, Japan) with higher GDP. So, by the same criterion, we could argue that only these three countries have any significant economy (total $40.733T), and the rest can be ignored. But then we will be ignoring more than half of global economy! It's clearly a logical fallacy.
I wonder how much comes down to the legalities of refunds and compensation. If the flight goes and you don't get on it then you lose your ticket money usually but if the airline cancels then they have to refund I think.
In my own case I have a flight from Singapore to London on May 30 approx with BA and I can't get to Singapore as it's closed for transit. If BA fly and I can't get there I'm not sure I can do much but if they don't fly I can probably get compensation like the EU standard 600 euro for a delayed flight. I think BA are still flying emptyish at the moment.
According to this pilot on youtube, that is one of the reasons, they don't have to refund. Another reason is to keep the crew and planes current and not have to retrain pilots or do additional maintenance checks on the planes later on. These seem to be required by law after a longer period of not flying.
There are people still trying to get home, this is a crucial service for them and specialists who are required around the world to keep things running.
It's a convention (a meme?), along the lines of "read the manual" being rendered as "RTFM".
In online discourse it is common for people to ask questions or make statements without reading the reference material being discussed. This is frustrating to other commenters who feel that a lot of the discussion is needless and effectively off-topic. Hence the aggression in the acronym is partly a joke that this is such a common occurrence that the expletive itself is part of the acronym. It's definitely not meant to be taken personally. Mostly.
The "whole purpose" of lockdowns are to reduce the transmission rate to a manageable level. Not to zero. Broad but imperfect compliance has proven to be more than sufficient to achieve this. Many nations are now loosening restrictions because the transmission rate has been pushed so low that there is room to increase it without overwhelming healthcare capacity.
Yes, to put this in perspective, each person has 'x' transmission opportunities on every journey to/from their lockdown base. 'x' can be expressed as 'x = n + m' for n people they would meet along their journey plus m people that have interacted and potentially infected every surface they touch. n and m are smaller for every journey not taken. MUCH smaller if people are broadly compliant with lockdown.
Therefore, even people breaking lockdown (justifiably or unjustifiably) are at reduced risk of transmission if other people are obeying lockdown.
Yeah, reality is a weird mix of probability (reducing trips and therefore likelihood of catching 2019-nCov off of them) and actuality (the path the virus actually takes - see Patient 31 [1]). Governments have to release guidance based on the former, but individuals might want to protect against the latter where possible.
A person at home with enough food and toilet paper to last a couple of weeks might have fewer contacts with other people over that period than a person who is stuck in a hotel in another city and constantly needs to have things delivered to, and taken away from, their room by other people. If the difference is large enough, it makes sense to send that person home.
How far in advance are the airlines cancelling flights? I've looked at flight cancellations lately, and it looks like about 30-50% of US domestic flights are being cancelled. I haven't really seen anybody talking about this.
Perhaps these airlines and their partners could repurpose some of their large jets for freight and acquire smaller jets to ferry passengers around. Small commercial aircraft manufacturers such as Embraer might turn out to be a good investment.
I still see quite a few flights from France to international destinations. For instance, right now AF342 - Paris - Montreal. Technically, France has been in a rather strict lockdown for a month, and all non-essential trips are strongly regulated. I really wonder who is in those planes. Canadians finally deciding to go home? Can they even make it to the airport without getting fined? And can French people even leave the Shengen area? Let say a French citizen wants to go to some country that still accept them, can they find a flight and go there somewhat legally?
Some are flying mostly for the cargo they transport, so the seats aren't very full. And then indeed they would take Canadians (or Americans flying via Canada) that want to go home. Cargo is also medical equipment etc that is really necessary in other places.
If you look at a flight-tracking site you'll notice Atlantic crossings starting at FL380 or even higher, for example now BA287 is at 40,000ft just coasting out in Ireland. That's not the normal altitude, typically we enter Oceanic airspace with an initial altitude of 35,000 or something similar with maximum possible (but not efficient) being 36ish.
Yeah. For a given speed, a lower weight (with the same outer shape) means you need to fly at a higher altitude (where the air is less dense) to reach an optimal lift to drag ratio.
Yes, entering Oceanic you basically tell them: "Request track Delta, Flight level 350, Able 370, second choice track Charly"
Translation: I want this route, the best altitude for me is 35,000 ft and at my current weight the maximum I can climb to is 37,000 ft. That optimum altitude is calculated by the flight management system.
Keep in mind these flights serve a lot of other routes. A French passenger may be going to somewhere else in Canada by connecting in Montreal and hoping on a WestJet flight.
Since AF isn’t flying to Vancouver or Toronto anymore, whatever scraps they had are consolidated on the remaining flights.
It could be mail related: Montreal has an int’l mail centre.
If going from Africa to N. America, it’s typical to need to transfer in Paris/Brussels/London/Frankfurt
Sweden’s largest airport at Stockholm now has a total of seven flights between now and the end of the day (another five hours). All regional flights. We normally get at least one flight every two minutes, just landing on one runway (I live under one of the flight paths). Normally they carry 71000 passengers per day and have 17500 employees at the airport.
I understand a lot of the repatriation flights, but I'm still seeing multiple OAK-LAS/SFO-LAS per day. Who is flying between these cities right now...?
Everyone is focusing on the aircraft, but the pilots are also super important here. They need to maintain a certain number of hours every 90 days, IIRC, in order to be flight ready. If not, they need to do a refresher in a simulator. As I’m sure everyone is familiar after the 737 max debacle, there is a shortage of simulators. This would mean it would take months or perhaps even a year to get all pilots recertified for commercial flight. That’s not a great situation to be in, and easily solved by keeping them flying.
87 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadIt's better for them to run highly unprofitable flights than miss their contract obligations with big corporations that want a plane available to move people transatlantic on a day's notice.
That's probably a mix of people with critical jobs needing to travel, people having to move for a variety of reasons, and people listening to the ignorant and ignoring the advice to social distance.
I know it's not the same as a commercial airliner, but I used to teach hang gliding on the beach and we'd sometimes get a little packed sand in the back of the keel (which is the name for the central bar that the wings were mirrored across). The total weight of the student plus the glider could get up to ~280 lb, and the amount of packed sand would be less than a pound or two, but the flight characteristics of the gliders would change drastically, to the point where we could barely get them in the air.
As another commenter notes below, the few people moving around the cabin is less about control ability and safety than it is about fuel efficiency.
It is not about balance.
Moving a few people probably doesn't cause an issue if the rest of the plane is completely empty.
If you move 20 people from the right side to the left side of the plane this will probably have some kind of effect.
On smaller regional aircraft they sometimes ask people to move seats to the other side or back to front.
[1] https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-a320-cog-economy/
They rarely upgrade to international first/business because the meals and other perks cost real money. And it'll piss off the people who payed over a thousand dollars for those seats.
Had an empty flight with Singapore Airlines right after Christmas and they didn't.
This is British Airways so we'll see.
Right now I'm in premium economy as for some reason the ticket was cheaper than economy.
Realstically speaking there is virtually no difference in service for them.
Assuming that I get the usual economy food and I'm really the only person on the flight.
2. Does it cost them significantly more to seat you in a different location? I'm asking, I genuinely don't know.
Now, if you fly regularly and have some miles status with that airline you can request all sorts of things. The gate agent has a lot of leeway in that regard.
So yes, the planes are empty, but September is the timeframe to watch.
Maintenance costs are based on different schedules, there is usually a time limit (as in calendar time), a flight time limit and a cycles limit (a cycle is one take-off + landing). Which one is more limiting depends on the type of operation the plane was designed for, A long-haul plane is designed for more flight-time vs cycles, a regional jet is designed for a high cycle count. So maintenance costs will decrease if you keep them on the ground, but some components may then "time-out" which will still incur maintenance costs to bring them back to airworthy condition.
I flew back from Mexico mid-March and going through the sweaty scrum unmasked felt a bit like being in Brunner's _The Sheep Look Up_.
They are now single digits. And, that's after massive amounts of reductions to flight schedules.
Boarding 10 people onto a plane with 130 seats with social distancing isn't so hard.
Similar for the ticket counters and TSA.
Honestly, it seems like a great time to reconsider our impact on the planet: All the things the naysayers claimed were impossible and could never be stopped or changed have been shut down in the span of less than a month.
However many people are furloughed and laid off. Sales aren't being made, which means money isn't coming in. To pretend that the current situation is "not so hard" betrays your privilege.
And many of the results of covid19 on society are the same as what must be done to combat climate change.
Covid19 has shown that extreme measures are possible if people actually believe in the consequences. It is also a good case that early prevention could have saved a lot of economical loss later on when the issue has grown too large to be ignored any longer, just like with climate change.
For example
"The number of cargo-only flights at Heathrow has surged to five times normal levels, with the airport now saying it is prioritising medical supplies as passenger travel grinds to a halt."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/14/heathrow-pas...
There may be some that are, although this article says the flights are upto 10% full. Given the average car is only 20% full that doesn't sound a terribly low amount.
The article also says
* One reason to keep so many flights going is to help the airlines implement their policies that promote social distancing
* Some travel is essential and it’s important that people who truly need to travel by air retain a way to do it.
It then goes on to say that many of the "13 Washignton-Boston flights" will be cancelled. Indeed of the 10 arrivals currently listed on [0], 5 have been cancelled.
[0] https://www.massport.com/logan-airport/flights/flight-status...
The surge in "cargo only" is flooding supply into a waning demand market.
Also, it seems intuitively obvious that moving N kg by plane is vastly less efficient than other forms of transport like rail or ocean shipping. We should be doing fewer energy-inefficient things and more efficient things.
According to wikipedia, Germany's economy (GDP $3.863T) is only about 4% of global economy (GDP $87.265T). Would you call Germany's economy insignificant?
More interestingly, there are only three nations (the US, China, Japan) with higher GDP. So, by the same criterion, we could argue that only these three countries have any significant economy (total $40.733T), and the rest can be ignored. But then we will be ignoring more than half of global economy! It's clearly a logical fallacy.
* Numbers taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
In my own case I have a flight from Singapore to London on May 30 approx with BA and I can't get to Singapore as it's closed for transit. If BA fly and I can't get there I'm not sure I can do much but if they don't fly I can probably get compensation like the EU standard 600 euro for a delayed flight. I think BA are still flying emptyish at the moment.
*https://youtu.be/x5HNUjVEPyQ
Compensation is due for flights cancelled within 14 days of the departure date, with an exception for extraordinary circumstances.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...
In online discourse it is common for people to ask questions or make statements without reading the reference material being discussed. This is frustrating to other commenters who feel that a lot of the discussion is needless and effectively off-topic. Hence the aggression in the acronym is partly a joke that this is such a common occurrence that the expletive itself is part of the acronym. It's definitely not meant to be taken personally. Mostly.
Remember they're only words... snowflakes will melt
In any case, in Canada all travellers are required to self-isolate for two weeks upon arrival.
Therefore, even people breaking lockdown (justifiably or unjustifiably) are at reduced risk of transmission if other people are obeying lockdown.
[1] https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTER...
If you look at a flight-tracking site you'll notice Atlantic crossings starting at FL380 or even higher, for example now BA287 is at 40,000ft just coasting out in Ireland. That's not the normal altitude, typically we enter Oceanic airspace with an initial altitude of 35,000 or something similar with maximum possible (but not efficient) being 36ish.
Translation: I want this route, the best altitude for me is 35,000 ft and at my current weight the maximum I can climb to is 37,000 ft. That optimum altitude is calculated by the flight management system.
Since AF isn’t flying to Vancouver or Toronto anymore, whatever scraps they had are consolidated on the remaining flights.
It could be mail related: Montreal has an int’l mail centre.
If going from Africa to N. America, it’s typical to need to transfer in Paris/Brussels/London/Frankfurt
Has air traffic dropped off enough to log similar changes?