Special report
Airlines are allocated specific time slots at busy airports to help ensure that runways are used as efficiently as possible. These landing rights are among an airlines’ most valuable assets and can be worth tens of millions of pounds. For the UK, the threshold for the use of these slots stood at 80% in pre-Covid times, which was about the same throughout Europe – if an airline failed to hit this threshold, it could lose the slot. During the pandemic, the threshold had been put on hold, and then run at a considerably reduced level once air travel resumed.
Pre-Covid-19, these so-called ‘use it or lose it’ rules had been implemented to help keep the industry competitive by incentivising airlines to fly routes, trade them or hand them back so other carriers, including new market entrants, could use them instead. As governments and governing bodies look to move on from the restrictions and regulations around Covid-19, the fear for airlines, and legacy carriers in particular, is that passenger traffic will not rise at the same rate. If airlines are being required to run more flights, concerns grow over their ability to fill them.
Cause for concern
The issue at the heart of this debate, of course, is that air travel is a very carbon-intensive activity, and the concept of ghost flights has proved to be a flashpoint for those campaigning for action on the climate crisis. Aviation is responsible for around 2.4% of global CO2 emissions, and when you take the other gases and water vapour trails produced by aircraft into account, the industry holds responsibility for around 5% of global warming.
So, in January 2022, after airlines made the announcement regarding their need to run ghost flights, the environmental activist group Greenpeace warned that at least 100,000 ghost flights could be flown across Europe over the winter months from the end of 2021 to early 2022. These flights were estimated to generate up to 2.1 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – or as much as 1.4 million average petrol or diesel cars emit in a year.
The cause for concern stemmed from a UK Department of Transport announcement on plans to compel airlines to hand back airport slots if they were not used 70% of the time from 27 March. This would rise from the then-threshold of 50%. Backlash to the Department of Transport’s announcement was swift. Many airline representatives were quick to point out that the slot usage threshold proposed would be the highest in the world, and voiced scepticism over whether such measures were useful for both travellers and the air travel industry. “It is inconceivable that international demand will average 70% this summer. The government is therefore condemning airlines to operate thousands of flights at
Future Airport /
www.futureairport.com
low capacity, which is environmentally stupid,” said Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Traffic Association, in a press release at the time.
Low-cost versus legacy airlines Many low-cost carriers took a different tune, however. Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary took a shot at Lufthansa in mid-January, after the latter carrier came out against Brussel’s changes to the EU’s ‘use it or lose it’ rules. Here, the European Commission was looking to raise the threshold from 50% to 64% by the end of March – also down from a pre-pandemic requirement of 80%. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spoher argued instead for softer thresholds for airlines, claiming that the 50% level was already forcing the carrier to put on 18,000 “unnecessary” flights in January and February alone. Prior to the EU’s announcement on the change to threshold levels, Lufthansa had been looking to cancel 33,000 flights that it would have run in a normal year. O’Leary was scathing, noting that legacy carriers like Lufthansa already benefitted greatly from the EU’s Covid measures due to pandemic bailouts and softer slot rules. “And now Lufthansa’s still not happy. They don’t want to operate ghost flights because: ‘Ohhh, the environment’,” he said in an interview with Politico, going on to refer to Lufthansa’s concerns over emissions as “crocodile tears”. “If Lufthansa doesn’t want to operate ‘ghost flights’ to protect its slots, then simply sell these seats at low fares, and help accelerate the recovery of short and long-haul air travel to and from Europe,” he added. Of course, it is not as if O’Leary is an unbiased observer in all of this. Low-cost carriers like Ryanair had been looking to expand as the global recovery from the pandemic continues and scooping up the landing and take-off slots that network airlines – whose long- haul routes have been slower to recover – would be one way to do so. Indeed, Ryanair would go on to fly more passengers in May 2022 than it had in May 2019 – a truly remarkable post-Covid recovery.
Lufthansa has argued against an increase in EU ‘use it or lose it’ flight slot thresholds.
14,472
The number of ghost flights that took place in the UK between March 2020 and September 2021.
UK Department of Transport 9
Nate Hovee/
Shutterstock.com
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