Are you planning to boycott the airlines or the airports? This waste was caused by airport policies; FTA:
>"The news has prompted the Belgian federal government to write to the European Commission, urging it to rethink the rules on securing slots.
Before the pandemic hit, the rule was that airlines must operate flights in at least 80% of their scheduled take-off and landing slots, or they risked losing them.
This was revised down to 50% after coronavirus broke out, but this still remains much higher than the actual number of flights needed to meet passenger demand."
If only they were the only choice! I would put the fault firmly in the hands of the bureaucrats or the politicians in the EU. This rule made sense pre-pandemic but it should have been adjusted for the current environment to something more like a right-of-first-refusal.
It's a bit of a hard problem isn't it? Flights and airport capacity have to be planned very far in advance and there are a limited number of slots - if you have airlines taking capacity and not using it, there's a huge opportunity cost for actual travelers who have to pay more, or can't get somewhere, because a necessary flight has been pushed out by an unnecessary one?
It seems to me these kind of rules have a place, but should be expanded to take slots away from airlines which operate lots of mostly empty flights, not just cancellations.
Of course I do think exceptions should be made for extraordinary circumstances like a pandemic.
Walt Disney owns their amusement parks and seems to do okay balancing capital costs and visitor demand. Why should anyone think governments have a special ability to own and operate airports?
The buck stops with the airlines. Many airlines have been accused of colluding with “free market” ticket prices. Surely they could also enact a gentleman’s agreement not to “steal” each other’s slots until travel demand is back to 2019 levels?
The 737 Max crash wasn’t because of scarce flight hours. It was caused because the training procedures didn’t train pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure (and ultimately because MCAS itself was flawed). Has any transportation safety board cited flight hours as a cause in any of the crashes?
How common of an event is runaway stabilizer on a commercial flight though? Of course it happens, but rarely.
If we’re talking about practicing for rare events a few hours of simulator time that puts pilots through various crises would be more useful than 100 hours of uneventful flying.
> It was caused because the training procedures didn’t train pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure
I disagree only in that the focus should be at a higher level.
Boeing was so focused on making sure that the 737MAX would be the same type rating as the 737, despite it having very different handling characteristics, that they developed things like MCAS which made it kinda-sorta like a normal 737, the only way that would succeed is if things like "MCAS failure" did not exist and therefore did not require training.
It's not that they didn't properly train people on MCAS, it's the fact that MCAS shouldn't have existed in the first place.
Why though? I'm not a fan of government intervention in general, but, when the system colludes to accidentally create perverse incentives (flying empty planes) I don't see an issue with the government stepping in to make the situation less perverse (no flying empty planes) while maintaining reasonable equity (right of first refusal seems like a simple solution to that).
I’m not saying the government shouldn’t regulate this (they should!). What I’m saying is the airlines are the ones ultimately dispatching these flights. Why do we all say “oh we can’t do anything about the tragedy of the commons until the government steps in?”
I'd say this is essentially an instance of the sequential monopolization problem and imperfectly aligned incentives due to a difference in the shape of each party's cost/demand curve.
The classical example of sequential monopolization is a car manufacturer and a local car dealership. The manufacturer wants to sell a large number of cars at a fixed price, while the dealership would rather sell a smaller number of cars so that they can maximize their margin on each sale.
Airports want high numbers passengers to maximize retail/parking/etc revenue (in which they have a monopoly), but don't directly care which flights are more profitable or how much the passengers pay for airfare as long as they fill the airport.
Airlines are maximizing a different demand curve, in which most of their profit comes from a small number of profitable routes while most other flights are slightly unprofitable. Their biggest incentive is to prevent competition on those premium routes, which they can do by monopolizing flight slots.
Sequential monopolization is a high-energy state for a market; absent other forces/regulations, it would be more profitable for the two companies to merge or otherwise form a partnership that looks more like a vertical monopoly.
All that said, we only care about this because of the negative externalities created by the current equilibrium, both in the carbon cost of air travel and the massive taxpayer subsidies for airport construction that are wasted then that airport's takeoff and landing slots are inefficiently allocated.
So, I'd say one possible solution would be to tax the airlines for the carbon used by all flights, perhaps at a penalty rate for flights above some amount of kg-per-passenger-mile.
My understanding is that this an international issue. It's something that made sense before the pandemic, since there is almost certainly competition for landing slots, but those slots should have been frozen when international flights so obviously dropped off in 2020. The FAA did drop the rule in the US, at least temporarily.
Consider, though, that many of these flights are only empty of passengers. A great deal of air freight has always flown on passenger aircraft, much more than on dedicated air cargo flights, and planes without passengers are often flying with full cargo holds.
Whereas in the US necessary flights have been cancelled left and right. I had to take a series of flights in the past two weeks, and it was an absolute mess. By the third trip, I honestly had no expectation that my flight would take off on time, if at all.
That and getting a PCR test this week in the NYC area seems totally non-functional. Appointments have to be made days in advance, for results which can several days to come back. It's a far cry form Germany where I can get same day service at any number of testing centers, and pay to get expedited results if I need to.
How can these systems be so broken, and why isn't capitalism solving them?
COVID tests are completely free, subsidized by the government. You can get COVID tests at very high prices on the "black market". If you don't want to pay those prices, you stand on line at the free testing areas.
Why do you think capitalism is broken here when its working just fine. The supply of testing is too low since its free to take them officially and there is massive demand
Are you talking about PCR tests, or antigen tests?
All I can tell you is that this week, my Aunt and I were both flying out of EWR. She needed a PCR test for the flight which was supposed to be Tuesday, and she started looking on Friday, but it was almost impossible to find anywhere with an appointment available before Thursday. And even those gave a very fuzzy 1-3 day estimate for results, which is quite unhelpful when you have to take the test within 72 hours of departure.
She spent an entire day trying to find somewhere which would take walk-ins, and eventually found a place through a fiend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who could get her in, although she did have to push the flight back by a day.
From my perspective, this just seemed totally broken. I don't understand how there could not be a vendor, easily discoverable through Google which could deliver same-day or next-day results at whatever price the market would bear, even if it was $300 or $500 or whatever.
It felt like being in a developing country where things just can't be depended on to work properly.
You can order at-home rapid antigen supervised (over webcam) tests to your home that are accepted for flights. Not sure it would come over night though.
But you're right it is totally broken: they should be auctioning these PCR testing slots to the highest bidder. But of course then there would uproar about "price gouging."
Somewhat similar to how everyone is complaining they can't find PS5s and yet Sony is unwilling to raise topics because the optics would be bad.
Are you sure there are at-home antigen tests which are universally accepted for international travel? I have been on a number of international flights during this period, and having read the entry requirements for a few different countries, this would be the first I have heard of this.
If you haven't been for a covid test lately, especially in a populated area, things have changed significantly. Lines are 4-12 hours long and often run out of tests before they can get to everyone. There are no appointments available. Urgent Care centers are overrun and can't handle nearly as many tests as people are requesting.
Because one of the options you stated (waiting in line) isn't even an option in a lot of areas.
This specific scenario has nothing to do with market theory. It's a combination of regulation, subsidization, and infrastructure. We're not buying playstations.
The tests are free to the person testing. They don't magically appear out of thin air. The government is buying them via the normal capitalist system but there aren't enough because the manufacturers can't make enough to meet demand.
Yes. That's the whole buy them months in advance part so you are prepared everyone in the US apparently forgot about. I feel like I was raised in a different generation.
Preparation is a thing. It was quite obvious we were likely to have a covid spike this winter. Anyone without a stock of antigen tests at this point has simply been irresponsible as it was trivial to buy a few boxes at $14/ea at walmart the past 6mo.
You realize if everyone was a "prepper" then you wouldn't have any tests either, right? Supply doesn't magically increase if people flood the stores a month or two early.
Very late reply, but this is only true on a theoretical level, and not in this case.
Abbott both destroyed unsold inventory (6-7mo from expiration dates) and closed down one of their production facilities they stood up for these tests due to lack of demand over the summer.
If everyone was a "prepper" (no, I don't think having some basic $7 tests sitting in your medicine closet really reaches this point at all, this is called "being prepared" and used to be a civic duty taught to children) the production would not have stopped, and they would not have let 2500+ workers go they are now scrambling to get back.
tldr; production was there, it was ended due to lack of demand. Yes, some (many) folks are in a financial position where $14 is a large expense, but those are outliers and certainly not the folks asking if I have any tests on hand right now.
Amazon has them and estimates 2 weeks out. I placed an order around Dec 25 and got them about 9 days later. That might not help right now, but it's not like the pandemic is going anywhere by the time I expect to get them (even w/ the delay)
I doubt it...my wife just traveled in December and she had to show results from an actual testing company or hospital. I don't think they would accept a photo from a home test? That seems ridiculously easy to fake - both the result, and it being your test.
There are antigen home tests valid for travel (https://www.emed.com/airline-travel); you take the test on a webcam and they watch for the entire 15 minutes until the result appears. If you move/obscure the test it is invalidated.
Not sure if there are proctored PCR versions. They'd have to go in the mail to a lab, but the test proctor could watch you seal it with a uniquely marked seal or something; that should ensure the sample that arrives at the lab is the same as the one you swabbed on camera.
There are no "take-home" tests with "results in minutes" that use PCR technology.
I was in London and Belfast last week between December 24th and January 1st, travelling from the U.S. (SFO airport)
I had to take a PCR test within 48 hours of boarding, and I had to take a PCR test upon landing in London, and was asked not to leave my hotel room until the results came back -- nearly two days later. They checked my vaccination and PCR test result before I boarded the plane, and passport control at the airport asked to see confirmation that I had a PCR test scheduled.
Before returning from the U.K. to the U.S. I was allowed to take a "rapid" test, but it had to be supervised either in-person or with a "tele-medicine" service that watches you over a video camera.
If I had tested positive, I'd be required to quarantine for 10 days in the U.K.
There was no requirement to test after landing, but I did--three times. NHS gave out rapid tests in "7-packs" and I was able to get 4 packs.
Any place in the US that requires appointments has never been reliable for me. If I went that route I would have to wait weeks to months to get a vaccine or PCR test.
Instead, poorer neighborhoods usually have hospitals or health centers that offer walk-up or drive-through services for vaccinations and tests. Sadly, most of the people in those neighborhoods don't use the services, so if you go right when they open you can get vaccinated or a PCR test with barely any wait. I waited 5 minutes to get my vaccine in Miami, and I waited about 15 minutes in a drive-through in Boston to get a PCR test with results the next day.
The government is subsidizing testing so very few people, even those who would could afford it otherwise, will be willing to pay for it. With no cost, controlling demand becomes a function of time instead of price. Whether this is a better solution is up for debate but capitalism isn’t filling the need efficiently because, well, it isn’t even close to a free market.
I would think that in a city like New York with multiple large international airports, there would be plenty of people willing to pay to get the PCR tests they need to get on an international flight on time. There must be thousands of people per day who need to get a test to get on a flight at EWR or JFK.
Currently that appears not to be the case, and there is no simple and reliable way to guarantee getting a test on time.
This seems to be a market failure, and it is not obvious to me why the market has not stepped in to fill this gap.
My local airport has PCR tests available with results in 35 minutes for $200. Every time I've looked, they have tons of appointments available for the same hour / within a few minutes.
And outside of the airport, last time I flew United directed me to some options that were $150, but had results the same day. At least where I live, there are definitely quicker options if you are willing to pay.
I've flown quite a bit in the past year - while there's been more cancellations than pre-pandemic, the last few weeks are outliers.
"Capitalism" can't produce new staff instantly at any price when staff are in industries that require substantial training/testing prior to being allowed to work after hiring (or after any long furlough/hiatus of not working, even if they remained officially employed).
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Anyway, you've got a perfect storm of issues.
Airlines have depleted crews from cutting too deeply in the early pandemic. Training/retraining large numbers of people takes lots of time, only so many people are actually qualified to teach or test them.
Airlines were already running what staff they have with as minimal spare capacity as they could get away with to meet demand that's come roaring back far faster than expected, especially for the holiday season. The US is currently running ~83% of 2019 passenger loads (12/20-1/4 passenger count in 2019/20 - 36.6m, 2021/22 - 30.7m), per the TSA checkpoint numbers.
And then....you have a new COVID wave that's leading to substantial portions of the workforce coming down with it and being unable to work for at least a week during their absolute highest load period.
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Are the airlines entirely "not at fault"? No. They cut too deeply in the early pandemic. And they've been too greedy chasing $$$ for renewed demand and added too many flights too quickly, cutting their spare capacity for issues that could crop up to nothing...and now they have.
But the severity of this COVID wave is significantly worse (in terms of # of people infected at once, not referring to illness severity) and pretty much every area of the workforce (that's actually in-person) is having similar issues. Many public schools in the US are basically just functioning as babysitters this week if they're open because they have too many teachers and students out to actually run classes normally.
Because there's no money in it. We're likely going to have a surge of cases over January (judging by what happened in South Africa). If I'm a test maker/provider, I'm not going to spend a week ramping up production, have the extra tests arrive in two weeks, just do be on the downside of the surge. It's the same reason I didn't build up more capacity in October. There's a vaccine and boosters are starting. Why would I take a gamble on a new variant?
One role of government is to step in when markets fail. We saw test shortages a year ago, and a new variant was an eventual likelihood. The government needed to place the test orders so that the risk didn't get shifted to markets uninterested in that risk. This is almost entirely a failure of government leadership.
To its credit, the US government did a really good job ordering vaccines. It's just handled testing very poorly.
I've been really grateful for airlines like Qatar Airways continuing to run their mostly empty flights. I've been on a flight with just 8 people in economy & business and most recently one with 30. I know people can call it wasteful, most things we do are wasteful, but it really means a lot when it's already a huge headache to get the paperwork to board the flight and I can't imagine having to worry about the flight being cancelled.
Sending a flight that unexpectedly turns out to be nearly empty is different from scheduling a flight that you know will be nearly empty. The latter would only happen due to wrong incentives. In this case, it sounds like the problem is that access to airport slots is based on how many flights you run or the consistency thereof.
Why not make access based on money? Money is universal. If you pay the airport, you get the slot. If you buy the slot for the month and then don't need it one day, you wasted some of the slot money, but you need not send an empty flight.
A pure-cash system provides incentives for incumbent carriers to buy (scarce) slots and leave them empty to limit competition. British Airways would definitely do this at Heathrow if allowed, for example.
Also, it potentially reduces actual passenger numbers, lowering the airport operator's take from duty-free and catering, which I suspect pays much more than the slot fees.
Perhaps you could add a clause “if you don’t fly the slot, then you pay most of what you would have spent on the flight”—high enough to ruin the perverse incentive, but low enough to encourage not making the flight unnecessarily. And perhaps an arrangement that most of the surplus goes to some charity or other.
The reason you would regulate something like this is because airport capacity is a huge bottleneck for air travel where demand always outstrips supply, and every flight which doesn't run creates a massive opportunity cost for a flight which would have otherwise served a lot of real travelers.
If you made it purely a pay-per-slot system, what would prevent some airlines buying a lot more slots than they need, making air travel more expensive and more painful for everyone?
If I had to guess the airport doesn’t make money just off of the flights, they also provide general services to passengers. Having a 30 person flight come through might net them parking, drinks, duty free revenue as well. Even some of the aero revenue like fuel or jet bridge usage are dependent on the number of flights.
Given that, the price for how much you charge an airline should take into account how many additional passengers they will bring through their doors. There has to be a price for lower frequency/more spikey carriers, but it is probably a good bit higher and could mean it is better to just run more flights.
Flights are an incredibly CO2 intensive activity. It's nice that it's convenient to you and the other seven people, but are the tradeoffs really worth it?
For all we know GPs airplane was turning around from dropping off a full passenger load, or was on its way to pick up a full load at a hub airport so yes an empty flight(loaded with less fuel than a full flight) is necessary sometimes to keep the network going. The fact that empty flights are necessary is a sad side effect of the system, but I wouldnt feel guilty as an individual about being on a particular empty flight.
That might be the case for any of these individual flights. My intent was to refute the other commenter's general point that it's a nice thing for airlines to run empty flights for the convenience of the passenger.
Well no, typically you would be put on a later flight or an alternate route. Maybe we should be willing to accept a non-zero chance that our plans will be disrupted by several hours to avoid burning massive amounts of extra carbon.
It’s not so easy anymore. You need PCR for entry to most countries. The PCR has a maximum validity period, usually 72 or 48 hours. If your flight is cancelled you may need to take a new PCR. At least in the UK it’s not easy to book a PCR at short notice (emergency PCRs exist but are very expensive), so you may need to wait a week before you can fly again. There may also be testing/quarantine arrangements that you may need to rearrange in the arrival country.
I agree that PCR testing requirements complicate things. I actually think COVID rules in general regarding flights are problematic - it adds a lot of uncertainty to the process of traveling.
If we want to have a testing requirement, I believe there should be some kind of general insurance set up - possibly by the state - to accommodate changes in travel plans due to a positive test result.
Also if a passenger has to fly later due to cancellation, the PCR validity window should be relaxed up to an additional day or two, assuming they are still asymptomatic at the time of the flight. Or maybe a second antigen test taken at the airport should be accepted.
I understand why testing requirements exist, but some balance should be made to make travel dependable, and if the government is going to add additional requirements to travel, it should ensure that all the costs and difficulties are not passed on directly to the citizen.
> To not put the flight in schedule in first place when they know it has been empty multiple times.
That is a good solution.
> we never want to even face a slight inconvenience to solve it
That depends, I would argue that changing flight schedules is not just a slight inconvenience, its more than that.
Are airlines even a big source of co2 emission when you compare it with other sources, we should be tackling the biggest emission sources not the small ones.
According to this it looks like passenger aviation accounts for around 1.5% of CO2 produced.
Additionally, according to this article: https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html the climate impact of flights should be considered with a factor of 2-3 times their base carbon emissions, due to additional effects specific to air travel, like nitrous oxide and ozone emissions.
Even at the base rate of 1.5%, that seems high for a single activity no?
> Even at the base rate of 1.5%, that seems high for a single activity no?
Well 1.5% is not too high if you ask me, it would be worth our time and money to tackle other emission sources which contribute 5% or more, not saying we should ignore airlines but forcing delays and harassment to airline travellers is not right.
I think situation is different when they had almost empty flights and not a festive season. In that case they can cancel the schedule months ago and provide different arrangement to the 6 people that booked.
The other option is that the price of the flight, which should include the damage it does to our planet, gets spread out to the 7 people on the plane.
So they could still fly, but at 20.000$ instead of 200$.
At that point it might be much cheaper for that plane to be canceled and for those 7 people to fly on a smaller private plane at 1000$ per person, doing less damage to the planet.
IMO any environmental damage tax should be required to be passed at least partially to the actual person being transported.
That makes it obvious to the passengers why flying 7 people on a 747 is wasteful.
> Should the customer change all his plans if the plane is not full?
No it not an option unless you are going to pay the cancellation and rescheduling fees of hotels and other transport for everyone.
So more tax on middle class people?
> IMO any environmental damage tax
So are you prepared to pay higher prices for everything which is transported by fossil fuels, if you keep doing that you will get a revolution, people will just fight and protest and vote out any politician who supports such taxes.
> No it not an option unless you are going to pay the cancellation and rescheduling fees of hotels and other transport for everyone.
The customer can buy extra insurance for that, or buy a ticket from a company that provides it. Such companies would be very motivated to only offer routes that operate at very high capacity to avoid paying.
> So more tax on middle class people?
How is this "class" dependent?
> So are you prepared to pay higher prices for everything which is transported by fossil fuels,
We are already paying the price for this. Both in cash (e.g. the price of insurance for homes for natural disasters has skyrocketed due to global warming in certain areas), and in a lower future quality of life for yourself and your children.
I'd rather have the people that use fossil fuels pay for them, instead of everybody else.
I get that some people like to travel by plane - i do too - and that sometimes you really want to eat that fruit that has been transported by boat from 20.000km away, instead of buying the food that's available locally. I sometimes like that too.
You seem to think that innocent children should pay with a lower quality of life to allow you to do these unsustainable things cheaply.
I strongly disagree with you here.
Pollution, climate damage, etc. has to be priced in.
If that avocado from 5.000km away were to cost 1000 $ instead of 2$ people would think twice about it.
The claim that we shouldn't do this because this only impacts non rich people is flawed. There are many things rich people can do, like buying a lambo, that poor people cannot do. Your claim that poor people somehow have the right to get a lambo, or for that matter, eat avocados, is false. These things are not "rights".
Flying to Buenos Aires from Rio, both LAN and Emirates had flights that cost nearly the same. I picked Emirates and was very pleased to find I had an entire row all to myself. Since they don't have enough traffic to fly to both Brazil and Argentina from Dubai, they fly to Rio and then on the BA, leaving that flight less than half full. My past experience with LAN was that they packed people in like US carriers so it wasn't a difficult decision to make.
My wife used to work for Emirates, and this was her favourite route as you had a long layover in both Rio and Buenos Aires :-) It meant you were away from home for almost a week, but it's much better to be away doing this than stuck on short flights to India or Bangladesh for a week (where you fly there and back without a layover).
I don't understand how "we didn't sell enough seats" is a legit reason to cancel a flight.
If I book a flight, I'm not getting that money back if I can't fly for any reason. But the airline can just decide "nah, I don't feel like upholding my part of the contract"?
He’s saying if he books the ticket and decides that he doesn’t want to fly for whatever reason, he’s not getting his money back if the flight doesn’t get canceled but that doesn’t seem to be the case for the airline.
Isn't that generally the case? I have never seen a situation where the airline cancelled a flight and didn't have to refund the passengers or offer another flight. Maybe a secondary/discount travel agency would make it hard to get a refund, but I'm pretty sure an airline can't just not fly you and keep your money.
I was refunded a flight just last week in the US.
And in Europe, there are laws on the books that the airline has to take care of you if there's an extensive delay. For instance, they have to pay for a meal at the airport if you have to wait for more than a few extra hours, and put you up at an airport if it's going to be overnight or offer a replacement train ticket.
The passenger can’t change their mind and get a refund if they decide they don’t want to fly anymore even if the flight goes on as scheduled.
The airline can change their mind and not provide the flight (and offer refund but that’s beside the point) if they decide they don’t want to fly as scheduled because it’s not profitable for them.
It’s a one sided contract. The airline has my money guaranteed (unless they decide they don’t want it) but I am not guaranteed to have the flight. It’s not about getting refunded if the flight gets canceled.
Most airlines offer refundable tickets which cost more. If you opt for a lower priced ticket without the option to change or refund, that’s the trade off you’re making
You have to pay more for fully refundable whereas all tickets are refundable by the airline if they don't feel like holding up their end of the contract. :-)
When you buy the non-refundable tickets, you agree to a contract in which they have unilateral rights to refusal. There is no obligation that every contract should enure equally to both parties :-)
Yeah, I definitely get that. Reminder that I wasn't the original person that made this point, I was simply clarifying it for them because I agreed with it. I am fully aware of the terms of the agreement when I buy flights but that doesn't make it any less hostile to customers. There aren't any alternatives to flying over oceans or even just long distances.
I think airlines engage in plenty of customer-hostile policies. I would argue that offering a clearly labled non-refundable option at a discount is not one of them.
The contract is what gives them the right to cancel. You can buy a flight ticket that won't be cancelled but you'd have to pay the premium required to charter the whole plane.
Generally contracts, especially B2C preformulated, non-negotiable T&Cs, are held to some standard of whether they're conscionable, reasonable, non-surprising etc.
How a contract that allows the company to unilaterally back out supposedly passes those tests in the EU boggles my mind.
Yes. The whole system for how our airlines and airports are managed is an utter farce. I understand that Airlines need predictability, however that should not come at the massive cost of the flying public by creating de facto monopolies/cartel environments.
Although I'm unfamiliar with the details, the pilots need to continue flying to maintain their type ratings.
Perhaps Lufthansa/Brussels Airlines could have used single-engine propeller planes (think Cessna 172 or the many other aircraft in its class) to decrease the cost and environmental impact?
Like how you are going to maintain your 737 or 320 rating flying a Cessna?
Besides, I suppose keeping a plane in storage and serviced while keeping your workforce certified and ready isn't that much cheaper than keeping all them somewhat flying.
If you mothball a plane for 2 years it requires a huge amount of work before it's qualified to fly again. Probably not higher cost than the total work of maintaining it in flying condition for those 2 years but the man-hours are a lot easier to manage when amortized over that period vs all at once.
When I think of global warming it's stuff like this that makes me chuckle. I can try to reduce my emissions, but the system is built for unlimited fuel burning. Leaving the oven on with the door open so you don't miss your chance to bake cookies.
Only if your idea of fairness is five for me, and one for you.
India's entire CO2 output is less than half that of the United States, by the way, and its per-capita output is one-eighth. [1] (And gods only know much methane is leaking from American wells. We really aren't interested in counting that.) If you're going to put the squeeze on someone, it should be on the latter... But because we aren't going to squeeze ourselves, we deflect, deflect, deflect.
[1] Since it seems to get by on emitting one-eighth what we do, it sounds like there's plenty left to squeeze from our emissions.
You have plenty of first world countries with a fraction of the US and Canada's per capita emissions.
You need to look within. You guys are very factually just wasteful. The US and Canada are the ones that stand out like a sore thumb among the First world countries. [0]
Only countries like Qatar and Kuwait are more wasteful than the US and Canada in CO2 per capita emissions.
It’s difficult to encourage change when your own per-capita emissions are three times the global average and cumulative emissions are still double that of the nearest country. We need to change first.
What "last few bits"? Essentially no country is on track for the Paris targets with their emission reduction plans, and the actual implementations lag behind even further:
It is going to increase the cost for USA as most of these pollution is for goods imported by US
>> China has some of the dirtiest air in the world, but a large share of the country's pollutants are generated during the manufacture of goods destined for countries like the United States, according to a new study.
>> about a fifth to a third of China's air pollutants—which include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide—were associated with the production of goods for export, and that about a fifth of those amounts were linked to the production of goods for the United States.
When I think of Global warming, I think of why we haven’t adopted Nuclear power - both fission and fusion, invested heavily in it, educated the public and never have to worry about electricity or energy use ever!? There should be zero concern about too-high-a-standard of living or having to meter electricity. We have almost limitless energy.
I feel like the world is going to keep complaining about energy usage in space if we become a space faring civilization. There are going to be space-environmentalists who will oppose fusion power.
I want to be clear - I want us to move to completely carbon free energy. Green house effect is not going to go away by chipping away at this or that. Some people in CA are telling me to not have kids so that we can keep the climate cool. Ridiculous. But no one dares to even suggest a Manhattan project with extreme urgency to solve this climate problem once in forever.
This is not just something that this airline does. There are MANY airlines that do that, especially internationally, but also domestically in the USA. The reason you likely aren't aware is that you fly at times when the routes are popular.
In the USA there is also a totally different issue, Congressional pork barrel that, e.g., subsidizes a route or even whole airline that serves the interest of a single Congressman so he does not have to take longer routes or fly on limited schedules. There are even famous instances of whole airports being built/funded for that very reason.
The federal government Essential Air Service program subsidizes airlines to continue with scheduled flights at small airports in rural areas even though there are few passengers. Most states have at least one such airport so Congress has consistently provided funding.
If it really is to provide commercial air access to rural places, unless the "rural places" happen to be near resorts or random rural wealthy people, I'd think anyone making over ~$40k per year in that region would benefit.
The bit to feel mixed about is to what extent we should subsidize people choosing to live in rural areas.
That sounds hard to believe because why won't a congressman just fly private jet?
If this is true, then maybe Russian-style corruption among politicians isn't such a bad thing, because it results, at least in this case, in much less waste.
That may have been true decades ago. Now, carriers are dropping the prices of first class seats and offering cheaper paid upgrades to coach seats (to get around corporate travel rules against buying specific fare class tickets), that upgrades are harder to come by and way less guaranteed than before.
Here's an example of United running way more flights than needed because LGA and DCA are slot-controlled and relatively close to each other so running a flight between the two keeps the slots in-use: https://viewfromthewing.com/united-airlines-will-run-32-new-...
I feel like I've been living under a rock after reading this. Seems like extremely low hanging fruit for international climate change regulators to simlply add regulation to stop incentivizing harmful emissions.
I'm sure we'll make this way harder to fix than it needs to be... as we watch that asteroid demolish us.
No. Instead I'll be hearing that I need to lower my thermostat and work on insulating my attic because the situation with climate is getting critical and everyone must do their part.
Oh, buddy, I also can't wait to receive more instructions from our heroic leaders. I love that extra spring in my step from knowing my selfless acts are _literally saving the world_. I still haven't come down from the moral high of not using plastic straws anymore.
But then they'll need pilots type certified to fly them and have to keep a load of smaller planes around just in case. Also, pilots will still need to fly the larger aircraft every now and then to keep their certification.
That'd how things were before, and it didn't work - there were just local monopolies by carriers who'd prefer not to have competitors and jack up the prices. Those "arbitrary" rules try to ensure competition.
This issue looks like something solvable through policy like the container stacking limit in port of LA if it gain enought traction. Would require governments to make airports "freeze" slots for some period of time?
By charging a tax upon fossil fuel use it discourages the use of fossil fuels. It uses the market to control pollution and companies would be forced to consider the full environmental cost of their actions due to it impacting the price.
You genuinely think a carbon tax would cost more than all the other costs associated with flying an empty plane? Pilots, cabin crew, ground services, fuel, depreciation of the aircraft, landing fees, ATC service fees, etc?
It wouldn’t be. The massive cost already isn’t stopping it.
But would it be enough to make airlines relinquish lucrative slots?
I personally feel the problem is more related to a bogus slot allocation/deallocation policy that forces an airline to fly an empty plane around to hold a slot. Could they not just remove that rather pointless requirement, and have some sort of market based approach to auction slots for a set period (say 1 year at a time)?!
> Could they not just remove that rather pointless requirement, and have some sort of market based approach to auction slots for a set period (say 1 year at a time)?!
The whole point of the current system is to combat old carriers that had local monopolies and refused to allow competition ( e.g. British Airways at Heathrow). Such a carrier could afford to spend money to prevent competitors from flying from their hubs, making themselves the only ( and thus more expensive) option.
The regulation is good, it just needs more fine tuning ( e.g. they should add a minimal passenger and/or cargo load, to make sure the flights aren't there just to keep the slots and are actually used).
They already did, the slot needs to "only" be used at 50% (it was 80-90% before), but obviously that isn't enough ( which couldn't have been easily predicted though, the pandemic is constantly evolving).
If you make fuel more expensive tickets will be more expensive and these empty flights will be a quite similar proportion of cost for airlines because the tax is the same with or without passengers.
Silly question: are the flight safety messages still played, and performed by air crew, on these empty flights? I believe it is a 'mandatory' requirement for passenger flights.
I once flew on a 767 with five passengers in total due to the airport being shutdown by a blizzard. We still got the safety brief. I was the only one in coach and a stewardess offered to let me sit up front if I wanted.
Is there some sort of service that identifies these planned-to-be-nearly-empty flights so that you can book them? I would absolutely love to be on a near-empty flight instead of a congested flight, and my schedule is such that I can fly out at more or less whichever time of day I want, so this would be extremely beneficial to me.
Or failing a dedicated service for this, is there at least a manual way of finding out which flights are going to be near-empty?
I don’t think this kind of data is known outside the airline. As far as I know public data is limited to available tickets and classes on a specific path.
If available ticket data is available, isn't that sufficient to map something like this? I'm just thinking outloud, but something which queries a ticket broker for a large number of tickets for each flight, and if the return is consistently that more than n% of tickets are available, the flight gets added as low-book.
Most US Airlines also charge you extra to select a seat on the cheapest fare level. At least American and Delta along with Spirit and Frontier. If you choose to pay that fee during booking, you can normally select a seat then.
At least with the European ones I've travelled let you see the selection first, then nag for money. So answer to parent poster would be that's one option, but it's a hassle since you have to fill in a lot of forms before the payment stage where you can see the seat selection.
You can use expertflyer.com, and go check Flight Availability for a particular route.
Within a route, it will suggest all the different options to get there. You can judge at a glance how much availability there is by looking at the available seats in the fare buckets. This is for an arbitrary flight from YVR to LHR on Air Canada:
An airline splits its seats into different “buckets”, and the list above is essentially ordered from most to least expensive. J, C, D, Z, P are for business class seats. O, E, N for premium economy, and Y and beyond for economy.
J9 means that there are at least 9 tickets available in the most expensive business class bucket. N3 means that there are exactly 3 tickets available in the least expensive premium economy bucket.
Industry-wide, J means business class and Y means economy, but individual airlines tend to have their own fare coding within there.
So with all of those nuances in mind, you can infer how full the flight is: the second least expensive business class bucket has at least 9 seats available, and the lowest one has 0, so it’s pretty quiet but not empty. Premium economy is probably 50% full. And economy seems to have a lot of space (all but the cheapest bucket have more than 9 tickets).
Conversely, this is a sample of a fairly full flight (today on AC, YVR-YYZ):
Expert Flyer also allows you to review the seat maps for each flight you see, but of course it’s more time consuming, because then you need to click into each option. So it’s best to learn the above syntax, and then use the seat maps to validate. It’s also worth noting that the seat maps aren’t foolproof: many passengers don’t select seats until they check in (because it costs $ otherwise).
Looking at the seat map for my first example above, I was able to validate that business class had 14/30 seats selected, premium economy had 12/21, and economy had ~70/~240 seats selected - lots of open space. A really good chance of having a whole block of seats to yourself.
Also another interesting fact: sometimes you’ll see something like Y3 but the flight is actually sold out. This is how airlines oversell their flights. Y is the most expensive economy fare, often not too far off from a cheap business class ticket - so it’s super profitable. So the airlines will generally keep a couple extra seats available for booking on a full flight. In the best case, a few people miss connections and they’ve pocketed all of that extra money. In the worst case, they need to bump one of the lowest paying passengers and pay them off. But the payoff doesn’t cost the airline much, if anything at all, because then having to do so meant that somebody bought a super expensive ticket in their place.
I remember this issue was in the (german) news for a time in march 2020 when it slowly dawned on everyone that almost all the planes we were watching in the sky were empty - most people had either stopped travelling on their own or were prevented so by travel bans. The airlines were only flying the planes as to not lose the slots.
EU institutions acted reshingly quick in that situation and suspended the rule for some time. After that point, flight traffic in Europe came to a virtual standstill as everyone went into lockdown.
It's a bit disappointing to read that the rule is back in action and apparently with the same results as before.
This info is not entirely correct: the sources they cite (in French and Dutch) say Brussels airlines is planning to make 3000 unnecessary flights. The mother company Lufthansa published this news themselves, I presume they also hope the rules get changed. Not that one should have sympathy for the airline, but it’s good to keep the facts straight.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadIs there a list exposing such assholery so I can boycott accordingly?
>"The news has prompted the Belgian federal government to write to the European Commission, urging it to rethink the rules on securing slots.
Before the pandemic hit, the rule was that airlines must operate flights in at least 80% of their scheduled take-off and landing slots, or they risked losing them.
This was revised down to 50% after coronavirus broke out, but this still remains much higher than the actual number of flights needed to meet passenger demand."
If only they were the only choice! I would put the fault firmly in the hands of the bureaucrats or the politicians in the EU. This rule made sense pre-pandemic but it should have been adjusted for the current environment to something more like a right-of-first-refusal.
It seems to me these kind of rules have a place, but should be expanded to take slots away from airlines which operate lots of mostly empty flights, not just cancellations.
Of course I do think exceptions should be made for extraordinary circumstances like a pandemic.
Or do you want another round of 737MAX because noone actually flown a plane in 6 months, since it was considered somehow better for enviroment?
Somehow I think this is actually related to the hours flown. Not entirely, but should we take these chances?
edit: Okay, that was exaggerated. Still, without regular practice the only thing there will be is more of perfectly avoidable crashes.
We cannot trade people lives for some theoretical reduction in emissions.
If we’re talking about practicing for rare events a few hours of simulator time that puts pilots through various crises would be more useful than 100 hours of uneventful flying.
I disagree only in that the focus should be at a higher level.
Boeing was so focused on making sure that the 737MAX would be the same type rating as the 737, despite it having very different handling characteristics, that they developed things like MCAS which made it kinda-sorta like a normal 737, the only way that would succeed is if things like "MCAS failure" did not exist and therefore did not require training.
It's not that they didn't properly train people on MCAS, it's the fact that MCAS shouldn't have existed in the first place.
Why though? I'm not a fan of government intervention in general, but, when the system colludes to accidentally create perverse incentives (flying empty planes) I don't see an issue with the government stepping in to make the situation less perverse (no flying empty planes) while maintaining reasonable equity (right of first refusal seems like a simple solution to that).
The classical example of sequential monopolization is a car manufacturer and a local car dealership. The manufacturer wants to sell a large number of cars at a fixed price, while the dealership would rather sell a smaller number of cars so that they can maximize their margin on each sale.
Airports want high numbers passengers to maximize retail/parking/etc revenue (in which they have a monopoly), but don't directly care which flights are more profitable or how much the passengers pay for airfare as long as they fill the airport.
Airlines are maximizing a different demand curve, in which most of their profit comes from a small number of profitable routes while most other flights are slightly unprofitable. Their biggest incentive is to prevent competition on those premium routes, which they can do by monopolizing flight slots.
Sequential monopolization is a high-energy state for a market; absent other forces/regulations, it would be more profitable for the two companies to merge or otherwise form a partnership that looks more like a vertical monopoly.
All that said, we only care about this because of the negative externalities created by the current equilibrium, both in the carbon cost of air travel and the massive taxpayer subsidies for airport construction that are wasted then that airport's takeoff and landing slots are inefficiently allocated.
So, I'd say one possible solution would be to tax the airlines for the carbon used by all flights, perhaps at a penalty rate for flights above some amount of kg-per-passenger-mile.
Consider, though, that many of these flights are only empty of passengers. A great deal of air freight has always flown on passenger aircraft, much more than on dedicated air cargo flights, and planes without passengers are often flying with full cargo holds.
Florida and Texas have been enjoyable. As AOC knows, no paperwork hassles there.
That and getting a PCR test this week in the NYC area seems totally non-functional. Appointments have to be made days in advance, for results which can several days to come back. It's a far cry form Germany where I can get same day service at any number of testing centers, and pay to get expedited results if I need to.
How can these systems be so broken, and why isn't capitalism solving them?
I’d wager it’s because free markets solve problems not entrenched cronies with political strings.
COVID tests are completely free, subsidized by the government. You can get COVID tests at very high prices on the "black market". If you don't want to pay those prices, you stand on line at the free testing areas.
Why do you think capitalism is broken here when its working just fine. The supply of testing is too low since its free to take them officially and there is massive demand
All I can tell you is that this week, my Aunt and I were both flying out of EWR. She needed a PCR test for the flight which was supposed to be Tuesday, and she started looking on Friday, but it was almost impossible to find anywhere with an appointment available before Thursday. And even those gave a very fuzzy 1-3 day estimate for results, which is quite unhelpful when you have to take the test within 72 hours of departure.
She spent an entire day trying to find somewhere which would take walk-ins, and eventually found a place through a fiend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who could get her in, although she did have to push the flight back by a day.
From my perspective, this just seemed totally broken. I don't understand how there could not be a vendor, easily discoverable through Google which could deliver same-day or next-day results at whatever price the market would bear, even if it was $300 or $500 or whatever.
It felt like being in a developing country where things just can't be depended on to work properly.
But you're right it is totally broken: they should be auctioning these PCR testing slots to the highest bidder. But of course then there would uproar about "price gouging."
Somewhat similar to how everyone is complaining they can't find PS5s and yet Sony is unwilling to raise topics because the optics would be bad.
Which of the many governments in the world are you talking about?
This specific scenario has nothing to do with market theory. It's a combination of regulation, subsidization, and infrastructure. We're not buying playstations.
(In part, because major manufacturers closed factories and destroyed inventory between spikes. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.htm...)
I'm a bit baffled as to why the Defense Production Act hasn't been utilized more during the pandemic for stuff like this.
Preparation is a thing. It was quite obvious we were likely to have a covid spike this winter. Anyone without a stock of antigen tests at this point has simply been irresponsible as it was trivial to buy a few boxes at $14/ea at walmart the past 6mo.
Abbott both destroyed unsold inventory (6-7mo from expiration dates) and closed down one of their production facilities they stood up for these tests due to lack of demand over the summer.
If everyone was a "prepper" (no, I don't think having some basic $7 tests sitting in your medicine closet really reaches this point at all, this is called "being prepared" and used to be a civic duty taught to children) the production would not have stopped, and they would not have let 2500+ workers go they are now scrambling to get back.
tldr; production was there, it was ended due to lack of demand. Yes, some (many) folks are in a financial position where $14 is a large expense, but those are outliers and certainly not the folks asking if I have any tests on hand right now.
Not sure if there are proctored PCR versions. They'd have to go in the mail to a lab, but the test proctor could watch you seal it with a uniquely marked seal or something; that should ensure the sample that arrives at the lab is the same as the one you swabbed on camera.
There are no "take-home" tests with "results in minutes" that use PCR technology.
I was in London and Belfast last week between December 24th and January 1st, travelling from the U.S. (SFO airport)
I had to take a PCR test within 48 hours of boarding, and I had to take a PCR test upon landing in London, and was asked not to leave my hotel room until the results came back -- nearly two days later. They checked my vaccination and PCR test result before I boarded the plane, and passport control at the airport asked to see confirmation that I had a PCR test scheduled.
Before returning from the U.K. to the U.S. I was allowed to take a "rapid" test, but it had to be supervised either in-person or with a "tele-medicine" service that watches you over a video camera.
If I had tested positive, I'd be required to quarantine for 10 days in the U.K.
There was no requirement to test after landing, but I did--three times. NHS gave out rapid tests in "7-packs" and I was able to get 4 packs.
Instead, poorer neighborhoods usually have hospitals or health centers that offer walk-up or drive-through services for vaccinations and tests. Sadly, most of the people in those neighborhoods don't use the services, so if you go right when they open you can get vaccinated or a PCR test with barely any wait. I waited 5 minutes to get my vaccine in Miami, and I waited about 15 minutes in a drive-through in Boston to get a PCR test with results the next day.
Currently that appears not to be the case, and there is no simple and reliable way to guarantee getting a test on time.
This seems to be a market failure, and it is not obvious to me why the market has not stepped in to fill this gap.
And outside of the airport, last time I flew United directed me to some options that were $150, but had results the same day. At least where I live, there are definitely quicker options if you are willing to pay.
"Capitalism" can't produce new staff instantly at any price when staff are in industries that require substantial training/testing prior to being allowed to work after hiring (or after any long furlough/hiatus of not working, even if they remained officially employed).
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Anyway, you've got a perfect storm of issues.
Airlines have depleted crews from cutting too deeply in the early pandemic. Training/retraining large numbers of people takes lots of time, only so many people are actually qualified to teach or test them.
Airlines were already running what staff they have with as minimal spare capacity as they could get away with to meet demand that's come roaring back far faster than expected, especially for the holiday season. The US is currently running ~83% of 2019 passenger loads (12/20-1/4 passenger count in 2019/20 - 36.6m, 2021/22 - 30.7m), per the TSA checkpoint numbers.
And then....you have a new COVID wave that's leading to substantial portions of the workforce coming down with it and being unable to work for at least a week during their absolute highest load period.
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Are the airlines entirely "not at fault"? No. They cut too deeply in the early pandemic. And they've been too greedy chasing $$$ for renewed demand and added too many flights too quickly, cutting their spare capacity for issues that could crop up to nothing...and now they have.
But the severity of this COVID wave is significantly worse (in terms of # of people infected at once, not referring to illness severity) and pretty much every area of the workforce (that's actually in-person) is having similar issues. Many public schools in the US are basically just functioning as babysitters this week if they're open because they have too many teachers and students out to actually run classes normally.
Because there's no money in it. We're likely going to have a surge of cases over January (judging by what happened in South Africa). If I'm a test maker/provider, I'm not going to spend a week ramping up production, have the extra tests arrive in two weeks, just do be on the downside of the surge. It's the same reason I didn't build up more capacity in October. There's a vaccine and boosters are starting. Why would I take a gamble on a new variant?
One role of government is to step in when markets fail. We saw test shortages a year ago, and a new variant was an eventual likelihood. The government needed to place the test orders so that the risk didn't get shifted to markets uninterested in that risk. This is almost entirely a failure of government leadership.
To its credit, the US government did a really good job ordering vaccines. It's just handled testing very poorly.
Why not make access based on money? Money is universal. If you pay the airport, you get the slot. If you buy the slot for the month and then don't need it one day, you wasted some of the slot money, but you need not send an empty flight.
Also, it potentially reduces actual passenger numbers, lowering the airport operator's take from duty-free and catering, which I suspect pays much more than the slot fees.
If you made it purely a pay-per-slot system, what would prevent some airlines buying a lot more slots than they need, making air travel more expensive and more painful for everyone?
Given that, the price for how much you charge an airline should take into account how many additional passengers they will bring through their doors. There has to be a price for lower frequency/more spikey carriers, but it is probably a good bit higher and could mean it is better to just run more flights.
If we want to have a testing requirement, I believe there should be some kind of general insurance set up - possibly by the state - to accommodate changes in travel plans due to a positive test result.
Also if a passenger has to fly later due to cancellation, the PCR validity window should be relaxed up to an additional day or two, assuming they are still asymptomatic at the time of the flight. Or maybe a second antigen test taken at the airport should be accepted.
I understand why testing requirements exist, but some balance should be made to make travel dependable, and if the government is going to add additional requirements to travel, it should ensure that all the costs and difficulties are not passed on directly to the citizen.
More importantly, it does not matter how much humans talk about climate change, we never want to even face a slight inconvenience to solve it.
That is a good solution.
> we never want to even face a slight inconvenience to solve it
That depends, I would argue that changing flight schedules is not just a slight inconvenience, its more than that.
Are airlines even a big source of co2 emission when you compare it with other sources, we should be tackling the biggest emission sources not the small ones.
I am not an expert but I found this article: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
According to this it looks like passenger aviation accounts for around 1.5% of CO2 produced.
Additionally, according to this article: https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html the climate impact of flights should be considered with a factor of 2-3 times their base carbon emissions, due to additional effects specific to air travel, like nitrous oxide and ozone emissions.
Even at the base rate of 1.5%, that seems high for a single activity no?
Well 1.5% is not too high if you ask me, it would be worth our time and money to tackle other emission sources which contribute 5% or more, not saying we should ignore airlines but forcing delays and harassment to airline travellers is not right.
Once pax have bought tickets, it’s harder to change the schedule without biting the hand that feeds you.
The other option is that the price of the flight, which should include the damage it does to our planet, gets spread out to the 7 people on the plane.
So they could still fly, but at 20.000$ instead of 200$.
At that point it might be much cheaper for that plane to be canceled and for those 7 people to fly on a smaller private plane at 1000$ per person, doing less damage to the planet.
IMO any environmental damage tax should be required to be passed at least partially to the actual person being transported.
That makes it obvious to the passengers why flying 7 people on a 747 is wasteful.
No it not an option unless you are going to pay the cancellation and rescheduling fees of hotels and other transport for everyone.
So more tax on middle class people?
> IMO any environmental damage tax
So are you prepared to pay higher prices for everything which is transported by fossil fuels, if you keep doing that you will get a revolution, people will just fight and protest and vote out any politician who supports such taxes.
The customer can buy extra insurance for that, or buy a ticket from a company that provides it. Such companies would be very motivated to only offer routes that operate at very high capacity to avoid paying.
> So more tax on middle class people?
How is this "class" dependent?
> So are you prepared to pay higher prices for everything which is transported by fossil fuels,
We are already paying the price for this. Both in cash (e.g. the price of insurance for homes for natural disasters has skyrocketed due to global warming in certain areas), and in a lower future quality of life for yourself and your children.
I'd rather have the people that use fossil fuels pay for them, instead of everybody else.
I get that some people like to travel by plane - i do too - and that sometimes you really want to eat that fruit that has been transported by boat from 20.000km away, instead of buying the food that's available locally. I sometimes like that too.
You seem to think that innocent children should pay with a lower quality of life to allow you to do these unsustainable things cheaply.
I strongly disagree with you here.
Pollution, climate damage, etc. has to be priced in. If that avocado from 5.000km away were to cost 1000 $ instead of 2$ people would think twice about it.
The claim that we shouldn't do this because this only impacts non rich people is flawed. There are many things rich people can do, like buying a lambo, that poor people cannot do. Your claim that poor people somehow have the right to get a lambo, or for that matter, eat avocados, is false. These things are not "rights".
If I book a flight, I'm not getting that money back if I can't fly for any reason. But the airline can just decide "nah, I don't feel like upholding my part of the contract"?
I was refunded a flight just last week in the US.
And in Europe, there are laws on the books that the airline has to take care of you if there's an extensive delay. For instance, they have to pay for a meal at the airport if you have to wait for more than a few extra hours, and put you up at an airport if it's going to be overnight or offer a replacement train ticket.
The passenger can’t change their mind and get a refund if they decide they don’t want to fly anymore even if the flight goes on as scheduled.
The airline can change their mind and not provide the flight (and offer refund but that’s beside the point) if they decide they don’t want to fly as scheduled because it’s not profitable for them.
It’s a one sided contract. The airline has my money guaranteed (unless they decide they don’t want it) but I am not guaranteed to have the flight. It’s not about getting refunded if the flight gets canceled.
How a contract that allows the company to unilaterally back out supposedly passes those tests in the EU boggles my mind.
Perhaps Lufthansa/Brussels Airlines could have used single-engine propeller planes (think Cessna 172 or the many other aircraft in its class) to decrease the cost and environmental impact?
Besides, I suppose keeping a plane in storage and serviced while keeping your workforce certified and ready isn't that much cheaper than keeping all them somewhat flying.
>squeezing the last few bits
tell that to .us companies that manufacture in China since 70s
India's entire CO2 output is less than half that of the United States, by the way, and its per-capita output is one-eighth. [1] (And gods only know much methane is leaking from American wells. We really aren't interested in counting that.) If you're going to put the squeeze on someone, it should be on the latter... But because we aren't going to squeeze ourselves, we deflect, deflect, deflect.
[1] Since it seems to get by on emitting one-eighth what we do, it sounds like there's plenty left to squeeze from our emissions.
You have plenty of first world countries with a fraction of the US and Canada's per capita emissions.
You need to look within. You guys are very factually just wasteful. The US and Canada are the ones that stand out like a sore thumb among the First world countries. [0]
Only countries like Qatar and Kuwait are more wasteful than the US and Canada in CO2 per capita emissions.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
Edit: added stats, it almost looks bimodal.
China is as capable as the rest of the first world to enforce higher standards if not more.
https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
https://climateactiontracker.org
>> China has some of the dirtiest air in the world, but a large share of the country's pollutants are generated during the manufacture of goods destined for countries like the United States, according to a new study.
>> about a fifth to a third of China's air pollutants—which include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide—were associated with the production of goods for export, and that about a fifth of those amounts were linked to the production of goods for the United States.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140122-ma...
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/5/1736
I feel like the world is going to keep complaining about energy usage in space if we become a space faring civilization. There are going to be space-environmentalists who will oppose fusion power.
I want to be clear - I want us to move to completely carbon free energy. Green house effect is not going to go away by chipping away at this or that. Some people in CA are telling me to not have kids so that we can keep the climate cool. Ridiculous. But no one dares to even suggest a Manhattan project with extreme urgency to solve this climate problem once in forever.
In the USA there is also a totally different issue, Congressional pork barrel that, e.g., subsidizes a route or even whole airline that serves the interest of a single Congressman so he does not have to take longer routes or fly on limited schedules. There are even famous instances of whole airports being built/funded for that very reason.
https://www.transportation.gov/policy/aviation-policy/small-...
https://www.enotrans.org/eno-resources/federal-government-su...
On hand, it provides real benefits
On the other, hard not to see this most benefits the wealthy. I count myself in that benefit
If it really is to provide commercial air access to rural places, unless the "rural places" happen to be near resorts or random rural wealthy people, I'd think anyone making over ~$40k per year in that region would benefit.
The bit to feel mixed about is to what extent we should subsidize people choosing to live in rural areas.
I'm sure we'll make this way harder to fix than it needs to be... as we watch that asteroid demolish us.
https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-ghost-flights/
I miss those random low headcount flights :(
It wouldn’t be. The massive cost already isn’t stopping it.
If (hypothetically) co2 tax would lead to reduction in other industries but keep emissions unchanged in planes, this is fine.
I personally feel the problem is more related to a bogus slot allocation/deallocation policy that forces an airline to fly an empty plane around to hold a slot. Could they not just remove that rather pointless requirement, and have some sort of market based approach to auction slots for a set period (say 1 year at a time)?!
The whole point of the current system is to combat old carriers that had local monopolies and refused to allow competition ( e.g. British Airways at Heathrow). Such a carrier could afford to spend money to prevent competitors from flying from their hubs, making themselves the only ( and thus more expensive) option.
The regulation is good, it just needs more fine tuning ( e.g. they should add a minimal passenger and/or cargo load, to make sure the flights aren't there just to keep the slots and are actually used).
I guess during the last pandemic of this scale, there wasn't really much of an aviation industry.
If you make fuel more expensive tickets will be more expensive and these empty flights will be a quite similar proportion of cost for airlines because the tax is the same with or without passengers.
They let me roll up the arms of the seats in the center and sleep across four seats like they were a bed.
They still did the safety message.
Or failing a dedicated service for this, is there at least a manual way of finding out which flights are going to be near-empty?
Which airlines do this? I genuinely think I've never seen the option to select seats while booking.
I’m annoyed on the relatively few trips where the carrier doesn’t allow this.
almost all non-low-cost airlines do this. BA, Iberia, Lufthansa, Air France, United, Delta, Avianca etc etc etc
Within a route, it will suggest all the different options to get there. You can judge at a glance how much availability there is by looking at the available seats in the fare buckets. This is for an arbitrary flight from YVR to LHR on Air Canada:
J9 C9 D9 Z9 P9 R0 O8 E7 N3 Y9 B9 M9 U9 H9 Q9 V9 W9 S9 T9 L9 K9 F0
An airline splits its seats into different “buckets”, and the list above is essentially ordered from most to least expensive. J, C, D, Z, P are for business class seats. O, E, N for premium economy, and Y and beyond for economy.
J9 means that there are at least 9 tickets available in the most expensive business class bucket. N3 means that there are exactly 3 tickets available in the least expensive premium economy bucket.
Industry-wide, J means business class and Y means economy, but individual airlines tend to have their own fare coding within there.
So with all of those nuances in mind, you can infer how full the flight is: the second least expensive business class bucket has at least 9 seats available, and the lowest one has 0, so it’s pretty quiet but not empty. Premium economy is probably 50% full. And economy seems to have a lot of space (all but the cheapest bucket have more than 9 tickets).
Conversely, this is a sample of a fairly full flight (today on AC, YVR-YYZ):
J0 C0 D0 Z0 P0 R0 O2 E1 N0 Y4 B8 M6 U6 H5 Q3 V2 W2 G1 S0 T0 L0 A0 K0 F0
Expert Flyer also allows you to review the seat maps for each flight you see, but of course it’s more time consuming, because then you need to click into each option. So it’s best to learn the above syntax, and then use the seat maps to validate. It’s also worth noting that the seat maps aren’t foolproof: many passengers don’t select seats until they check in (because it costs $ otherwise).
Looking at the seat map for my first example above, I was able to validate that business class had 14/30 seats selected, premium economy had 12/21, and economy had ~70/~240 seats selected - lots of open space. A really good chance of having a whole block of seats to yourself.
Also another interesting fact: sometimes you’ll see something like Y3 but the flight is actually sold out. This is how airlines oversell their flights. Y is the most expensive economy fare, often not too far off from a cheap business class ticket - so it’s super profitable. So the airlines will generally keep a couple extra seats available for booking on a full flight. In the best case, a few people miss connections and they’ve pocketed all of that extra money. In the worst case, they need to bump one of the lowest paying passengers and pay them off. But the payoff doesn’t cost the airline much, if anything at all, because then having to do so meant that somebody bought a super expensive ticket in their place.
It served a purpose so it wasn’t unnecessary after all :-)
I remember this issue was in the (german) news for a time in march 2020 when it slowly dawned on everyone that almost all the planes we were watching in the sky were empty - most people had either stopped travelling on their own or were prevented so by travel bans. The airlines were only flying the planes as to not lose the slots.
EU institutions acted reshingly quick in that situation and suspended the rule for some time. After that point, flight traffic in Europe came to a virtual standstill as everyone went into lockdown.
It's a bit disappointing to read that the rule is back in action and apparently with the same results as before.