CLIMATE
Almost 2 years into the pandemic, empty flights
are still ‘frying’ the planet
By Lottie
Limb •
Updated: 06/01/2022
A major
airline has revealed it is making 18,000 unnecessary flights this winter,
prompting environmentalists to call for rules around Europe’s airport slots to
be reviewed.
The
Lufthansa Group - which includes Brussels Airlines, Austrian Airlines,
Eurowings and Swiss - is having to fly “empty” aircraft just to keep its
take-off and landing rights at European airports.
Belgium’s
federal mobility minister Georges Gilkinet urged the European Commission (EC)
to put a stop to this “environmental, economic and social nonsense” yesterday,
after it emerged that 3,000 of these “ghost flights” were from Brussels
Airlines’ planes.
Greta Thunberg
is among those taking fire at the so-called “use it or lose it rule” which
drives the problem. “The EU surely is in a climate emergency mode…” she tweeted
sarcastically.
Campaign
group Stay Grounded called the empty planes a flagrant example of “bull****
flights” - among which it also includes short-haul trips, private jets and
space tourism.
"It
seems like the fact that we're in a severe climate crisis and that flights are
the fastest way to fry the planet has not yet arrived in the heads of decision
makers and airlines,” the group tells Euronews Green.
“If it had,
empty flights would not be allowed anymore."
Why do
airlines have to maintain their airport slots?
Currently,
airlines must operate flights in at least 50 per cent of their scheduled
take-off and landing slots, or risk losing them. This threshold was revised
down from the usual 80 per cent when the pandemic hit in 2020, but is set to be
raised up to 64 per cent from the end of March until the end of October 2022.
Announcing
the change on 15 December, the EC said that air traffic estimates suggest the
skies will be almost 90 per cent as busy this year as in 2019. But with
airlines continuing to take a hit because of Omicron critics say the rule is
still too strict. Lufthansa alone has said it plans to cancel 33,000 scheduled
flights by the end of March.
At times
during the pandemic, airport runways have essentially been plane-parking
facilities. Yet in busier times, these spots are a precious commodity for
companies who vie for their share of air space.
The 80/20
rule (as it’s normally known) is about allocating scarce airport capacity
efficiently, says the International Air Transport Association (IATA). It gives
airlines the security to advertise tickets almost a year in advance, allowing
customers to book trips in the long-term.
Lufthansa is making 18,000 unnecessary flights this
winter to keep its airport slots.
No mention
is made of the climate impact in IATA’s explanatory fact sheet. So is it really
the best way of doing things?
An unlikely
alliance of airlines and environmentalists think not. Speaking to Frankfurter
Allgemeine newspaper last month, Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr described the
18,000 trips as “empty, unnecessary flights.”
And the air
company’s EMEA spokesperson Boris Ogurksy tells Euronews Green that more
flexibility is needed this winter.
“Other
regions of the world are taking a more pragmatic approach here, for example [in
the US] by temporarily suspending slot rules due the current pandemic
situation. That benefits the climate and the airlines.”
Ogursky
also clarifies that all 18,000 Lufthansa flights will carry some passengers or
cargo, so are not completely empty.
The issue
of empty - or near-empty - flights, extends beyond the German-based carrier.
Other major airlines including KLM and Air France say they are counting on
further flexibility from the EC to avoid these unnecessarily polluting
journeys.
It’s been an
ongoing problem since March 2020, when several carriers retained their normal
flight frequency for weeks simply to keep slots at hub airports across Europe,
the Irish Examiner reported. At the time, Cork airport went from handling up to
15,000 passengers a day to just 40.
As
activists have pointed out, the EC’s inflexibility flies in the face of the
European Green Deal commitment to cut carbon emissions from the transport
sector by 90 per cent by 2050.
Most, but
not all, of Lufthansa’s 18,000 “ghost” flights are operating in Europe but it
can be tricky to calculate their exact environmental cost.
Catherine
Livesley, founder of No Fly Travel Club says, “a short-haul flight on a 737
emits approximately 18 tons of CO2 per hour - that is almost twice what an
average European citizen emits in an entire year.
“It seems
incomprehensible that we actively require airlines to produce these colossal
emissions simply to secure landing slots - even at 50 per cent of normal
capacity.
“Airlines
and airports must make it a priority to find a better solution - and should be
incentivised by governments to do so".
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This article is
more than 8 months old
Airlines flying near-empty ‘ghost flights’ to
retain EU airport slots
This article is more than 8 months old
Analysis from Greenpeace finds deserted flights are
generating millions of tons of harmful emissions
Arthur
Neslen
Wed 26 Jan
2022 06.00 GMT
At least
100,000 “ghost flights” could be flown across Europe this winter because of EU
airport slot usage rules, according to analysis by Greenpeace.
The
deserted, unnecessary or unprofitable flights are intended to allow airlines to
keep their takeoff and landing runway rights in major airports, but they could
also generate up to 2.1 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions – or as much
as 1.4 million average petrol or diesel cars emit in a year – Greenpeace says.
“The EU
Commission requiring airlines to fly empty planes to meet an arbitrary quota is
not only polluting, but extremely hypocritical given their climate rhetoric,”
said Herwig Schuster, a spokesperson for Greenpeace’s European Mobility for All
campaign.
“Transport
emissions are skyrocketing,” he said. “It would be irresponsible of the EU to
not take the low-hanging fruit of ending ghost flights and banning short-haul
flights where there’s a reasonable train connection.”
When the
Covid pandemic began, the European commission suspended a benchmark requiring
airlines to maintain 80% of their flight operations to keep their slots open.
In October,
Brussels upped the benchmark to 50%, and it will rise again to 64% in March.
Lufthansa
CEO, Carsten Spohr, said that his airline may have to fly 18,000 “extra,
unnecessary flights” to fulfil the adjusted rules, and called for the sort of
“climate-friendly exemptions” used in other parts of the world.
A Lufthansa
spokesperson said that between January and March 2021, just 45% of its flights
were full.
The other
5%, or 18,000 flights, “we define as unnecessary”, the spokesperson added. “If
we wouldn’t risk the loss of slots in certain airports in Europe, we probably
would have cancelled them and put them together with other existing flights.”
Greenpeace
applied Lufthansa’s proportion of ghost flights to other European airlines
based on the German carrier’s 17% market share, using a conservative estimate
of 20 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a flight.
The
research assumed an average flight time of 90 minutes by a 200-seater plane,
over a distance of 800-1,000km.
Tim
Johnson, director of the Aviation Environment Federation, said that the
Greenpeace assumptions were “spot on”.
“It looks
like an example of wastage in the industry and I think people will be surprised
by the scale of it,” he said. “It hints at a real problem of airlines being
forced to operate either empty or very low-occupancy flights in order to
maintain their slots.”
Socialist
MEPs in the European parliament have demanded answers on the problem, and Greta
Thunberg, the climate strike leader, sardonically tweeted that “the EU surely
is in a climate emergency mode”.
The
European Commission denies that air carriers are operating ghost flights, or
that its “use it or lose it” slot rules have created problems.
A
commission spokesperson said: “Empty flights are bad for the economy and the
environment which is exactly why we took several measures allowing companies to
not have such empty flights. If airline companies decide to keep empty flights,
this is a company decision, which is not the result of EU rules.”
Brussels
argues that it has already cut slot requirements and that airlines can request
that even those be stood down if flights are disrupted by “severe sanitary
measures” such as new government travel restrictions.
Earlier
this month the Ryanair CEO, Michael O’Leary, complained that big airlines
benefited from generous EU breaks, “and now Lufthansa’s still not happy. They
don’t want to operate ghost flights because: ‘Ohhh, the environment’,” he told
Politico.
The
cut-price Irish airline wants Lufthansa to sell unsold tickets at cheap prices
and for the commission to force it to release unused slots.
Air France
says that it wants greater slot rule flexibility, but a spokesperson said that
it would not give data on how many under-capacity and unnecessary flights it
was currently flying.
Johnson
said that it was right to focus on climate impacts when huge amounts of CO2
were being emitted unnecessarily but that there was a “wider industry battle”
which pointed to the need for slot reform.
“We need
something that genuinely rewards efficiency,” he said. “Some sort of efficiency
metric as the basis for allocating slots that would allow an operator with a
modern full plane to be preferred over rival carriers, who are operating with
much lower load factors or older technologies.”
This article was amended on 27 January 2022.
At the beginning of the pandemic the European Commission suspended the flight
benchmark altogether, it did not cut it to 25% as stated previously. Also,
the 50% benchmark was introduced in October, not December.
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