How would the auction work? For example, how often? I guess the airline need stability in their schedules. I don't know what incentivizes airports to take the "use it or lose it" model, it I'd be curious to understand that, because it must be at the center of this.
I agree of course that if a flight is happening only to maintain a slot then it's a ridiculous outcome. But as others have pointed out, there is cargo, plus pilots keeping current, plus keeping the plane in service (I dont believe you can just park a plane for months and then bring it into service again without a lot of work). Lots of procedures have been established under the premise of regular flights and it's not so simple to just rework all of them is my guess.
Something like 5 or 10 years would work well. If an airline can't make the route work, they could then sell what's left of their slot to someone else - including to a cargo airline like DHL, FedEx, or even Amazon Air.
Under the current system, legacy carriers got their slots for free or very cheap so they do wasteful things to keep their slots. They've been using smaller than optimal planes for years, and since the pandemic started the empty planes thing has gotten more common.
Airports benefit from having passengers come in, and so part of use it or lose it is ensuring that at very busy airports slots are as full as possible. Upstarts can and will take slots at such airports because they are worth their weight in gold; LHR to JFK makes $1B in annual profit for British Airways alone, for example.
Airports also benefit from stability, though; airlines taking up a large percentage of traffic at a hub drive more traffic than if all those slots were split due to network effects. And to some degree people who transit airports tend to transit the same ones, so there are downsides to hectic, constant auctions of slots.
The main issue is that COVID has made demand totally dry up across the board, and so the inherent assumption, that giving away a slot will bring in passenger traffic where there is none, has fallen apart.
Can you share data source for 1B? This seems like it's 1-2 orders of magnitude off based on gut feel and I'd like to understand how I can be this far off.
"That’s the revenue that British Airways generated each year linking its London Heathrow hub and New York John F. Kennedy International Airport, where a healthy mix of tourist and business customers made it the most lucrative route on the planet"
Yeah I saw that after I posted (I misread it as revenue because that is what makes sense), I assume that's (revenue is) what the GP meant, and am realizing now that maybe the 1-2 orders magnitude comment was about the disparity between revenue and profit.
The airline business is notoriously unprofitable, so yeah, the amount of revenue required to make a billion dollars profit would be something absurd, possibly more than the entire industry on many years
The beauty of using supply&demand to sort out all these conflicting priorities using price as the discriminator is it works better than any bureaucratic system ever has.
> it works better than any bureaucratic system ever has.
And there we go! While there's definitely cases where basically supply and demand trumps any other allocation system, in this case it will just kill competition and some will just hyperbole their expectations to win. Look at the UK's defunct rail franchising system where pure money play was used (they somehow always fails because they overbid).
While I'm all for taking UK trains back under public control, note that one of the problems with the existing rail franchising system is that the franchise operators have almost no skin in the game. The trains and tracks are owned and operated by other companies. The franchise operators tends to be subsidiaries set up with very few assets, and can just be shut down if they fail. And while narrow margins of errors relative to their projections cause many of them to fail, when they succeed the profit relative to the actual investment made by the parent companies can be huge.
The incentives structure has been all wrong in that there is basically no penalty for the parent companies in taking outsize risks and underfunding the operations and then walking away if they fail.
Align those incentives and the rail franchising will likely still have issues but nowhere near as bad as today. E.g. if Deutsche Bahn faced having Arriva (their subsidiary which owns it's UK train operating companies) or themselves having to actually put up financial guarantees for the full period and facing long term effects on their ability to bid for future franchises, their bids would look very different.
Put another way: When Virgin and Stagecoach were actually held to reasonable standards (being expected to actually properly fund pensions? the horror) which led to Stagecoach being disqualified from several bids they caused a massive stink and Virgin Trains closed.
Any outfit going bankrupt buying landing slots will have those slots then sold to the next lowest bidder by the outfit's creditors.
There are many stories of governments trying to half-bake a market system resulting in failure. You have to set that against the absurd result of 18,000 empty flights of a fully regulated system.
They do make money off of those, but they also make money off of all the people traveling through and purchasing duty-free or airport food and drinks and what have you.
The reason for this regulation existing is that in the past airlines could shut down competition by buying gates. Because many of the big airports have gates assigned to specific carriers, so if there aren’t any gates for a new airline to buy/lease/whatever then that airline can’t land at that airport.
While the airlines are saying we need to do this so that the gates are available when demand returns, what they’re actually doing is making it impossible for any new airlines to start up.
Basically the cost of these empty flights is less than the cost of competition from a new carrier.
Dedicated gates are much less common in Europe than it is in the US; slot-limited airports tend to much more be about runway slots than they are about gate capacity, and increasingly many airports in Europe are limited by runway capacity with little (politically) realistic chance of expansion.
But yes, fundamentally it's a case of the cost of operation being lower than the risk posed by new airlines.
So, perhaps instead of making the flight, the airlines should be allowed to pay a tax equal to 80% of whatever it costs to actually operate the flight?
1. It would have to be much higher than 80%. Airlines aren't software companies; their margins are horrible ;-)
2. "whatever it costs to actually operate the flight" is... well, good luck negotiating that bill :)
NB: they are not flying empty because no one wants a seat! They would be able to sell some seats! Even at previously-prevailing market rates! And of course could fill the plane if they sold the seats at any price!
They are flying empty because they can't sell enough seats at a high enough price to justify the fixed cost of the number of cabin staff required if there are customers on the flight.
It's about cabin staff regs, not about literally no one wanting to fly.
Thank you, this is an interesting insight that I hadn't considered. So planes are flying without cabin staff or catering, and potentially with less fuel (no idea if the weight of passengers is material here).
And in return, they are maintaining a complex system that has no central authority and is not easy to change. It doesn't sound ideal, but I also know that it's not something the single "they should just" solutions that outsiders propose will actually work in. Hopefully things get closer to normal soon and we won't have to worry about it.
The airlines are currently paying a "tax" by running the flights empty but that cost is just being burnt as fossil fuel and helps no one.
By switching to a tax for unused gates/ flight slots that is 80% of the cost of flying an empty if plane, the Airline saves money, the airport makes money, and the environment has fewer CO2 solutions. It is a win-win-win on all sides.
It helps everyone involved in fuel delivery, airport operations etc. Don't underestimate the government incentives to maintain the status quo.
If you switched this over to a tax you'd also need government programs to deal with the unemployment, lack of pilots and other ramp-up issues when this situation ends etc.
I’m unsure - some of these are triangular routes, A-B, B-C, C-A.
While A-B might empty, you need the plan landed on B to take the other two routes…
I worked a few months for an Airline and IMHO it’s one of the most complex operational model I ever saw. Fuel, weight, different fueling prices per location, dynamic pricing, crew management, climate, route management, maintenance, green laws, …
No, I am not sure. An airport’s purpose is to fly passengers. I don’t really want a mechanism for airlines to pay just to have empty gates. Isn’t that kind of dystopian? Shuttered gates, paid for by Delta to ensure its monopoly?
It's the airport equivalent of a land tax: making people pay for hogging scarce resources is a strong incentive to either use them or sell them off to somebody else who will.
I'm sure this could be worked out using some combination of paying for the slot and requiring a minimum amount of passengers/cargo. Exact numbers would require some tuning by people who know about this but doesn't seem impossible to get right. E.g. have airlines pay a fee for any empty seat below an 80% full plane.
Having planes fly empty to maintain a monopoly is just bad all around
I came here to write something like that.. The headline outs Lufthansa as doing something wrong, well, their action is idiotic in the greater scheme of things, but it's entirely reasonable within the constraints of the system in which they must operate.
The trouble with auctions — and I admit this may be a trigger response to the specific example of cell phone radio spectrum — is that the participants who have mountains of capital will use it to price out competitors and new upstarts.
They are different in that the company is still putting seats that can have passengers into the air. That’s the point of an airport, right? Flying people. If Lufthansa wants to spend money to fly 99% empty flights, the consumer still can hop on and fly places.
> the participants who have mountains of capital will use it to price out competitors and new upstarts.
Lufthansa's interest is piqued. They already price out competitors, they've bought many smaller airlines (even the "national" airlines Swiss and Austria) and operate them at slim to negative margins to keep the workers quiet (the threat of bankruptcy prevents them from rebelling too much)..
Isn't maintaining the slot more about making sure there's a plane in the right place at the right time if somebody wants to buy a ticket on a scheduled flight at the last minute? A bus wouldn't change route because it was empty. There might be somebody at the next stop.
A large airline could probably manage this better but if a smaller airline (city hoppers, especially) sacked off empty flights, they might not have the inventory or pilots to manage future legs.
I'm not arguing against action. The current situation is ludicrous.
I think one of the reasons why this system exists is to keep airlines from buying slots they will not use, which could both be anti-competitive and bad for the airport (passengers = money, planes = service, support, fuel, etc).
That's all fine in normal times but in a pandemic crisis (or environmental crisis) it's very silly.
There's whole economy around the flight. Ground handling, refuelling, passenger services etc. Charge for an unused flight slot would have to account for all of that too.
Lufthansa is not without blame here, but they're just responding to incentives from European administrators - the same people that brought you "chopping down America's forests to be burned in European power plants, because they'll grow back so it's green!" [1]
I won't speak to how the previous poster intended the phrase, but the correct takeaway from "just responding to incentives" isn't that it morally justifies anything, it's closer to "what the hell did you expect?". In that sense, I suppose it is much like "just following orders". You would have to be very naive to think that not accepting "just following orders" as a defense will lead to atrocities not happening when the people in power actually order them.
You’re right, of course, but it’s somewhat despairing to see how accepting we are of immoral behavior on the grounds that it is financially incentivized.
I'm not sure it's acceptance as opposed to resignation (I know, potato potato). "People will follow incentives" might as well be a law of physics, and not accepting it is like not accepting the inverse-square law for gravitation. Like, what are you going to do?
> I'm not sure it's acceptance as opposed to resignation (I know, potato potato).
I definitely see it as being used to excuse bad behavior, which is a step up from resignation IMO
> "People will follow incentives" might as well be a law of physics, and not accepting it is like not accepting the inverse-square law for gravitation.
This seems to deny any moral agency to "people". If someone were to offer $100 million to whomever kills the CEO of Lufthansa, anyone taking them up on that offer would be morally culpable. Hopefully we don't just resign ourselves to say "yeah, I'd have killed the CEO too, people follow incentives"
No no, I mean that if someone offers $100 million to kill the CEO of Lufthansa, that CEO is going to end up dead regardless of how hard evil we proclaim the killer to be. Much better to go after the guy offering $100mm.
Similarly, saying that Lufthansa is evil for destroying the environment is some shade of true but also useless. If incentives dictate large organizations to destroy the world, they will do so, and the fact that they are evil is moot. This does not excuse the evil, indeed the most immediate corollary would be that we should change the incentives, say, by punishing the airline and more importantly rewriting the rules to punish future infractions, which is better than changing the rules after the fact.
I'm pretty sure we agree about concrete issues (what happened was bad, we should make it stop) so my beef is perhaps philosophical, but people get so hung up on discussion about how this corporation is evil and that politician is corrupt and so on, and this line of thought where you try to classify the world into actors of various shades of morality is useless! Saying that someone was evil is useless without a workable plan to replace them with a reliably good person, but such plans (and people) almost never exist! People will follow incentives, and the only thing that ever works at scale is setting things up so that "evil" actors will do the right thing out of self-interest! /end rant
If there was no cost in terms of prison time and a criminal record, I would have no problem with killing a stranger for $100000000, and so I suspect would plenty of others.
Punishment is the only thing keeping your morals in check? I'd definitely have a massive problem with killing anyone, for any price, even if there was no punishment whatsoever...
This is a community primarily for founders though.
I'm not sure how to phrase it properly, but there is a strong selection for people with lax morals here for the simple reason that it's a competitive advantage. A founder with lax morals will generally outcompete someone with stronger morals, as such few people at the top of organizations of any size have strong morals
Selecting for being a psychopath is a short term benefit at best. We have progressed as far as we have because of co-operation and compassion, despite the morally deficient among us.
Serious question: have you ever killed anyone (you never know ...) ?
I ask because I'm a former infantryman and I personally know a handful of people who have. Of those people, most were quite sure they wouldn't have a problem with it, but guess what ...
I'm going to assume you've never dealt with this issue, even indirectly. I have not met a single person who has killed someone, and for whom $100M would make slightest difference. If anything, the people I've met would happily pay to undo the act.
The previous poster is just grandstanding here. There clearly exist people who have killed multiple times for much less money. Maybe the first time they didn't know what they were getting into, but that can't apply to later killings.
When people say "they're just responding to incentives", what they often imply is that we should be changing the incentives, or going after the people who made those incentives. I think that's true on both a practical and moral level.
On a practical level, we are not going to get a corporation to make less money, for the most part, by appeals to morality. It just doesn't work. Changing the incentives absolutely does work. Both of these have been proven time and again.
On a moral level, I really don't think it's the fault of companies when they respond to incentives. We have a society in which people elect representatives to pass laws and regulations. If they pass bad laws and regulations and people follow them, then it's the regulators' fault, not the people they regulate. You can't have every person in the system enacting their own idea of morality - partially because they don't have the complete picture, partially because they don't have the same morality, partially because any company that decides to change how it behaves without the regulations themselves changing will just be outcompeted in most cases.
The one big caveat to that is that companies have a pretty massive amount of influence on the regulators themselves, and they can definitely use that influence in moral or immoral ways.
It is always easy to say that someone else should go out of business to save the planet for you.
I often see this on HN in form of "working on X thing is immoral and everyone should just quit and not accept that work" and it makes the commenter feel superior to all the immoral people who work on immoral projects all the while forgetting that people just want to put food on the table.
In case it is not painfully obvious to you by now: YOU would have also been following orders had you been there.
It's not a binary, though. They could have openly petitioned for relief and offered their expert opinion on the current situation and the realities that faced them.
I'm also entirely sure that the people who made this decision weren't thinking of food security, but just regular old securities.
There are plenty of people working for Lufthansa whose jobs would cease to exist if the company (or part of it) goes under. Yeah, yeah, capitalism and greed, but at the end of the day if they lose their business it will have way larger effect than just some billionaire losing money.
So if someone held a gun to your head and demanded that you kill someone, and you pulled the trigger, then you're doing something morally wrong? I feel like my sense of morals at least allows for doing something morally wrong if you're being forced to do it.
This example is not at all representative of how things actually are. Most of all not for non disenfranchised companies and people. There’s no NATO nation remotely holding a gun to any big companies head. In any sense of the word.
I have to think again just wow. Your example is such an extreme stretch with almost no relation to reality.
In utilitarian ethics it depends on how people value life. If everyone is equal it doesn't matter, because you trade one life for another. If we allow the system to be higher order and allow for a symmetry split in "self vs other" then self-preservation becomes the moral thing.
It consequentalist ethics the previous details can be formalized differently, but it helpfully points out that if you are coerced then someone is coercing you, hence your moral agency is pretty much diminished. Yet if the consequence of your actions is that someone dies and without your actions they wouldn't have died, then sure, it's morally wrong. But that's hard to know when you have to make such a decision.
In virtue ethics you can simplify this to simply say that protecting the life of others' is a virtue and shooting people in the head is a vice, so let's do the virtuous thing! (Of course protecting your own life is a virtue too!)
(And AI Alignment folks spend pages upon pages discussing these problems of how to even began thinking about a formal ethics that is sort of computable. Should the agent predict the consequences of their possible actions and then compute the utilitarian value of them and thus choose the action that has the most utility? Should the agent factor in the possible actions of the coercer? Should the agent factor in time? If the agent is terminated it cannot maximize future utility. If the agent can live forever by default, then future utility can be much much much more than the utility of "one life". Should then one human life be valued at "infinite + 1"? Are we on a tangent to transfinite ordinals? Yes, yes we are! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A50BB9C34AB36B3 )
It is absolutely not morally wrong. Self-preservation is not morally wrong, at least not for the 1:1 exchange described here. Things get fuzzier for a 1:N exchange.
Survivors of WWII also base their claims against the aggressors on the assumption that despite being held a gun on your head doing the "morally right thing" should prevail.
> Survivors of WWII also base their claims against the aggressors on the assumption that despite being held a gun on your head doing the "morally right thing" should prevail.
Did they prosecute every single soldier of nazi germany for war crimes? For good measure did they also prosecute every single civil servant of nazi germany, because they helped the regime operate?
Stop parroting useless phrases out of a libertarian book, it just makes you sound lost and misguided.
The EU, which is where this regulation comes from, has no "monopoly on violence", it doesn't have any army or police jurisdiction. Maybe there are some security forces that physically guard the various EU buildings and officials? Huge monopoly there!
>The EU, which is where this regulation comes from, has no "monopoly on violence", it doesn't have any army or police jurisdiction.
That's like saying the legislature doesn't have a monopoly on violence because they don't have a police force or army. The EU laws are enforced through its member states. If they refuse they're kicked out, which usually provides enough incentive.
> If they refuse they're kicked out, which usually provides enough incentive.
Absolute bullshit. Member states cannot be forced out of the EU. Laws are proposed by the EC and voted by the EU Parliament, both of which are representative of the EU member states.
>Absolute bullshit. Member states cannot be forced out of the EU.
So what happens if EU enacts some sort of legislation, and a member state refuses to implement it?
>both of which are representative of the EU member states.
How is this relevant? Does having representation mean you don't have a monopoly on violence? That's like saying the US government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, because congress votes on laws and is representative of its citizens.
You seem to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not feeling sorry for "the poor billion dollar companies", I'm just arguing they're not acting immorally.
Actually, while lots of ideas and phrases from the "libertarian book" are objectionable (as with every movement), this is one of those I find is the most clarifying of how the world actually works.
At the end, deep down, whenever you pass a law or regulation or whatever, you're essentially forcing people to do something at the threat of violence. That is how laws are enforced - either with fines, which turn into violence if you refuse to pay them, or with actual violence.
It's not an empty idea to remember that that is what is actually being proposed, even if it's sometimes painted in nicer language. (And less relevant to our immediate discussion, but this same concept is relevant in the fact that some minor offense can sometimes literally turn into police ending up killing people, e.g. the various horrible cases in the US that sparked BLM protests.)
>but this same concept is relevant in the fact that some minor offense can sometimes literally turn into police ending up killing people, e.g. the various horrible cases in the US that sparked BLM protests.
In free societies, the monopoly on violence is granted by the people in order to create a more just society than would exist in the alternative (power granted through popular or mob violence.) It only considers violence as encoded in law to be justified to that end, not all forms of violence committed by any person representing the state. So police arresting and detaining people is an example of the state exercising its monopoly on violence, but police brutality isn't.
Regulation is as challenging as adding features to complex software systems. Achieving the desired outcome without causing any undesired consequences is very hard.
In some ways, it's even harder than adapting complex software systems: At least software systems don't commonly consist of subsystems with independent, self-interest-seeking goal structures that lobby you during design for features they favor or exploit latent defects post-deployment.
No one [in the west] cares about the [lack of consumption] of places like the Gaza Strip, Central African Republic, Chad, and so on. A headline referring to the consumption of Gaza or CAR would be rather obtuse with how little people know about the difficulties of either countries/areas. CAR being in perpetual civil war, Gaza being a land locked ghetto.
Palestine and CAR roughly use a bit more than a combined 200 Gigawatt hours/year. That’s low double digits kilowatt hours/yer/person.
For some context, the US uses 5 megawatt hours/year/person. That’s under 50K average electricity usage per year per person outdoing both countries with a combined population closing in on 150x. Obviously this is oversimplifying things but outdoing energy, carbon emissions, what have you, of a number of countries wouldn’t be difficult.
Paper straws are generally more energy and resource intensive than plastic straws.
The switch to paper straws was theoretically about eliminating single use plastics.
As someone who has done scientific surveys of beach flotsam: my personal feeling is that the switch to paper straws will change precisely nothing as far as global plastic pollution goes.
Hold on - you’re saying that by using paper straws, you damage the earth even more than plastic ones? Plus they don’t even work? Why is this not all over the news!?
Almost all the plastic alternatives are worse. Plastic is a wonder material and unfairly demonized.
Instead of banning plastics we should have invested in waste management infrastructure in the developing countries where almost all the ocean plastic originates from. Probably would have been cheaper too.
No mention about how most plastics contain endocrine disruptors[1], this is having a real world impact on human procreation. BPA was only the first of many boogie chemicals in this space. This is also impacting children in a way we don't understand fully yet [2].
The biggest impact to human procreation is globalization and falling wages amongst the working class. Survey a few millennials and ask if they'll be having kids. They don't have the time or the money.
We've removed BPA, but there are plenty of other hormone analogues we're exposed to. Soy, for instance.
Endocrine alteration is probably nowhere near as bad as the particulate matter we're breathing in, the amount of sugar we're consuming, or the time we're spending on our phones.
All this to say that I don't think "plastics as hormones" is as bad as the other stuff we have to worry about. We should triage it appropriately.
I was thirsty at a popup in a park recently and they handed me boxed water. Since I really hate the taste of water passing through cardboard I asked for a single use plastic cup, preferably with a single use plastic straw. In those words.
Nature quickly healed.
I pretended that using the recycling bin would change something, but I know that nobody takes our garbage anymore.
Nice I snagged another one, I should start making a tally of people guessing my political affiliation on this forum since they have no aggregate chronology and respond to a single data point
That many flights probably does match the fossil fuel consumption of some countries with low levels of electrification. What a tremendous waste of resources.
Funnily enough Lufthansa cancelled two of my flights in 2020. Their solution to avoid refunds was to completely remove my bookings from their system and assumes it no longer exists. Their local representative is clueless, their phone support never answers and there is no way to contact a human being there.
But now I get why: They have been busy flying empty planes.
I can't blame them too much though. They are trying to cope up with regulations and their competitors are fierce.
> These Regulations make three changes in relation to slots allocated for the scheduling period which
runs from 31st October 2021 to 26th March 2022 ...
> the list of reasons on the basis of which non-utilisation of slots can be justified, which appears in
Article 10(4) of the Regulation, is expanded to include certain government-imposed measures
related to COVID-19 which severely reduce the viability of, or demand for passenger travel
on, the route in question.
It's literally in the begining of the article, the regulations were adapted for COVID, but it was apparently insufficient. Do you have any valid criticism of the regulation or is it just "bad" because "Europe"?
> meanwhile, in a country that left the EU
At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small.
relaxing these requirements during a period of heavily restricted air travel is an objectively correct policy
the organisation's institutional inflexibility/political inability to solve this very simple problem is yet another demonstration of the EU's current structure being unfit for purpose (or able to respond in a timely manner to current events)
> At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small.
there are plenty
note that any perceived negative changes are immediately reported as a direct consequence of leaving
however the converse is not true: positive changes don't tend to be reported as a direct consequence of leaving
make of this what you will
(and unsurprisingly: it takes a while to see the effects of more responsive and accountable governance)
Good stuff, though from my understanding a slot is a airport allocation to land/take off. So an airline would have slots at the departure and destination airports and with that, some would be forced to make the flights to cater for the other end connection.
This existed pre-COVID but is more of a thing now. See Half as Interesting - Why Heathrow Airport Had Empty Flights to Nowhere (3 years ago, pre-covid) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8XZriAdB1g
While it's a small percentage of overall flights worldwide this is just wrong. Laws are complex but why waste this huge amount of resources and add to global warming.
surely you don't have to fly every flight to keep the slot open, as there are such things as cancelled flights due to mechanical issues + weather anyway. So how does the rules for the slots work - it says "EU rules require that airlines operate a certain percentage of scheduled flights to keep their slots at major airports." are cancellations due to weather taken off of this percentage, I mean you would think so because otherwise phenomena such as that volcano in Iceland about a decade ago would mean everyone loses their slots?
So what about mechanical issues? Are you allowed a certain percentage - is there a buffer or has anyone ever had too many mechanical issues and lost a slot thereby because they went down below the percentage.
on edit: text somewhat confused as we have the percentage of flights that can be missed, and my asking about the percentage of mechanical issues that one can have as well as the percentage of cancellation of flights due to weather and how it affects things.
That's true, though it's a tricky problem. The requirement to fly was to ensure airlines weren't buying gates, then not using them, solely to stave off competitors. That situation results in less capacity, direct-connect cities, flights, etc, to serve the airport's customers.
It's also not feasible to switch carriers too often, as the carriers need some amount of infrastructure of their own, time to fold in service/schedules, local employees or contractors, etc. Some airports now have common use gate terminals, networks, kiosks...that helps, but it's only a small percentage of them.
I'm sure there's a better system for how things are now, but I think it was set up with the right ideas in mind at the time.
> Pretty sure the airlines would love to not burn money holding a spot.
I'm absolutely certain they would. Monopolies are incredibly profitable, after all, and a repeatable strategy for killing off all newcomers is step zero.
I.e., that government rule was created to address a rational but pathological behavior in a market.
Lufthansa could always not fly those routes. But then the business would lose money to fines, possibly lose gates, and maybe go bankrupt.
So, yes, in the name of the business. And of course that business's behavior is completely predictable.
Anyways.
Pointing fingers at isms is a waste of time. Businesses operate in markets. Markets are human inventions. Especially in the case of something like an airline, a Market is a Market in the Stock Market sense not in the Bazaar sense.
The question is: how do we modify market rules without re-introducing the aforementioned pathology?
Which is a REALLY hard question! The simplest solution, from a market perspective, might be charging a fair price for carbon, such that this sort of behavior is no longer rational. Of course, that's a non-started politically, so... here we are.
My understanding is the EU had already reduced the need to fly slots during covid. That could be reduced further but it appears they are doing the opposite.
But anyways you “stop pointing fingers” is funny when it’s literally a government rule creating this mess.
Thank you for your substantive suggestion re: how to change these rules without risking re-introducing the pathology they were designed to address. Truly insightful stuff.
>how to change these rules without risking re-introducing the pathology they were designed to address
seems pretty obvious? drop the flight requirements when covid lockdowns are on and flight volume is low, then when flight volume picks up reinstate it. It's not rocket science.
The problem is that the EU is requiring using X% of flight slots (reduced due to Covid), but those flights aren't actually running due to low demand, so empty flights are used to hit X%.
If they simply reduced X%, then they could run fewer flights.
"All in the name of business"? You mean "all in the name of government". It's the EU government forcing companies to waste money and harm the environment.
"As a result of Lufthansa Group’s latest figures, the Belgian federal government has written to the European Commission, calling for a change to the rules on maintaining slots."
Sad that it took EIGHTEEN THOUSAND empty flights before the bureaucrats noticed something might be amiss.
There should be a special government office whose sole job is to identify ridiculous situations like this and be able to fast track a pragmatic solution.
Maybe you could call them an arbiter - not because they arbitrate anything, but because they can act arbitrarily, that is, they have the power to make exceptions from the rule.
A lot of people don't have faith in democracy and call for a "strong man" to take matters in his own hands. I believe if there was an office like this, we could take the wind out of their sails.
Basically every government office should be capable of handling this kind of situation. We don't need a "new but different government office, we need faster more reliable government in every office.
Companies has done way worse things to make money, this needs a regulatory fix. If they don't do it some other company would just fill those slots and fly empty and come out ahead, even a minor company would raise capital and take the slots since it means lots of future profits. This is the strength of capitalism, if one player drops the ball another will pick it up, meaning if you want the player to drop the ball then you need to not just complain about that player but instead you need to remove the incentives to hold the ball.
So here’s my guess on why countries like to assign use-it-of-lose-it “slots”: it’s easiest for the local flagship airline to keep its slots because it can do a short-haul flight wherever.
Meanwhile, Lufthansa has to fly all the way to Elbobia to keep its elbonian slots and has the most incentive to give them up.
I was just saying, how does it really help the Dutch airline to have all these slots in the Netherlands if they can't use them to fly to, say, hm, Canada?
Don't they need slots at the Canadian airport too? So both Canadian and Dutch airlines end up holding slots they can't use. I don't see anyone benefiting here.
Check out the Tenerife air disaster ( deadliest ever) for what happens when a pilot spends too long on a simulator and forgets real life details, while in a very bad situation ( bad weather and overcrowded airport). Protocols have drastically improved since then, but still, simulator isn't the same as real world flying.
What a waste of fuel and useless emissions. They could just change the rule that if there is 0 passenger or a no show, that the airline can cancel the flight before closing the door. But the staff must show up and be ready.
That would ensure that (1) people will book confidently and not create a death spiral, while 2) avoiding wasteful emissions
Then these flights would still operate, but with a few passengers on board. They probably could sell some seats, but that would require them to provide full flight crew which would cost them money. Instead, they probably moved those passengers on to other flights.
That's what I'm saying--put a higher cost on running empty planes. If they have to give away 100 tickets (or pay passengers to fly!) and staff the plane, they might start wondering whether it's worth it. Also that kind of giveaway would deflate prices across the market, making this empty planing a ruinous exercise for everyone.
This info is not entirely correct: they cite ‘the bulletin’, which links to sources that say Brussels airlines is planning to make 3000 unnecessary flights, as part of 18.000 flights planned by their mother company Lufthansa. 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. And note that in this case, pressure on the EU officials could still help prevent (at least a part of) these flights.
As civilization begins to crumble due to extreme weather, rising seas, and refugee migrations, one thing we can say is “well, at least we kept our flight slots”
So what I'm hearing is carbon footprint is something you only have to care about when the good times are rolling and things like business continuity planning and risk analysis could have in no way stymied this practice of ghost flights which will surely go down in history as one of capitalisms more opulent and pointless excesses.
The executives behind these industries that are wantonly polluting and leading us inexorably to climate catastrophe are going to have to explain to their kids why it was Climate Genocide was necessary... for the sake of the shareholders.
This kind of throwaway irony might have a place elsewhere on the Internet, but it’s not what we come to HN to read.
Unfortunately you seem to be attracting a handful of thoughtful responses alongside some other over-trodden irony, but the latter means the former is going to at best be sunk to the bottom of the page and at worst, live on only in a detached thread.
You alone? Probably not. Then again the impact of a single person is pretty limited, and you can't compare the emissions of an entire system (ie. the airport) to a single person. A quick search says this
>The best-performing 60-watt equivalent LED bulbs available today consume 85 percent less energy than their incandescent counterparts. [...] Lighting accounts for 15 percent of global electricity consumption and 5 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions
I'm not going to do any math here, but based on those numbers it seems plausible that the whole world switching to LED lamps will offset all the "flights had been flown empty to keep slots" in the world.
So it's already possible to not have to change a normal light bulb for 10 years — in fact there's currently a bulb that's been burning for 118 years.
The parent comment actually makes a good point, and shifting the blame for global warming to non-corporate entities is disingenuous. Sure, go ahead and recycle, buy LEDs instead of incandescent bulbs, buy local produce, these are all good things to do and I would never discourage them, but let's not buy into the nonsense that it's going to make a dent compared to say, shipping containers (https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...). To do so would move focus away from where things really need to change.
If I was someone partial to conspiracy theories, I might point out that this shift in focus is convenient for the corporate entities I alluded to.
You're touching on an opinion of mine that has hardened a lot in the last decade. You aren't going to solve systemic issues by going after random individuals. Systemic issues exist because some center of power benefits. Keep the focus on them.
That was specifically for "not having to change light bulbs for a decade" being "a huge motivation to switch".
As I said, I would never discourage people using LEDs, recycling etc. for other very good reasons. I just think it's important that we're honest on the impact of me using 2 LED bulbs in my house, vs. an entire office block having their lights and air conditioning on overnight.
Let's focus on making changes where it will have a large impact, like the shipping containers I mentioned. Anything else is counterproductive.
The way that it’s managed matters. OPEC also increases supply when it is advantageous to themselves, and certainly wouldn’t supply-limit themselves out of a market.
You know this is disingenuous, right? All of the things you described are water saving measures - the rationale for them is almost completely divorced from the climate change argument made by GP.
I mean there's definitely a conversation to be had about the effectiveness of domestic water saving measures in comparison to industrial ones, but I'm not sure it's entirely relevant here.
The point is the same: none of the things we've been told to do to conserve actually make a difference. They're just a relief valve so we can feel in control, so we can be blamed for individual failings when massive polluters, water users, plastic makers, etc can continue to create waste.
>when massive polluters, water users, plastic makers, etc can continue to create waste.
You realize most of these "massive polluters" are polluting on behalf of you? PG&E isn't emitting a gazillion tons of CO2 for fun, they're doing so to produce energy for you.
This is the same kind of "individual responsibility" nonsense that allows manufacturers of plastic bags to continue to produce billions of them while we pretend us recycling has any effect.
It's propaganda, specifically made to allow the true polluters to continue unabated while we impotently discuss ways to individually handle a collective problem.
Plastic is better off in the landfill anyway. Shipping it to China takes a decent amount of carbon, creates a decent amount of ocean pollution. Burying it locally is usually better managed and sequesters carbon.
But it’s still good that people are in the habit of recycle because metals like aluminum are still very advantageous to recycle from an energy perspective.
That used to be a much bigger deal in the US back in 1975. Our house had a coal bin and a coal fired boiler at that point. Insulation was non-existent in many places.
With almost 50 years of construction differences, moving that thermostat saves much less energy nowadays.
What discomfort? My children and I go barefoot and T-Shirt while the rooms have 19°C.
They are slim and muscular, ideal BMI, so spare me any "fat isolates" comments.
Subjectively, I am chilly keeping my house at 19° than at 22°. Not sure if this is an effect of thermostat placement or Nest’s algorithm for hot water rad heat (True Radiant).
How about +13 while just wearing more clothes? That would do a huge impact on ecology. Maybe even save us another hundred or so years before global warming comes
Of course, the correct way to allocate slots is to auction them off.