I'm doing it again - this is another lazy repackaged piece of "journalism". It's a bunch of links to other publications which did the actual heavy lifting, with some limp commentary thrown in. The "Bloomberg reported" link doesn't even go to the Bloomberg story (it goes to the Guardian... because its actually from the Guardian). The "according to Greenpeace" bit also straight up quotes it wrong (Yahoo says Greenpeace says yearly ghost flights cause pollution equivalent to 1.4 million cars, the Greenpeace headline says yearly ghost flights _in the EU_ cause pollution equivalent to 1.4 million cars).
It's also funny because by fusing together a bunch of semi-unrelated stories, you end up bizarre combinations. The majority of the article isn't about airlines flying empty flights to keep their slots, it's about Qatar straight up avoiding taking up 'slots' (of sorts), but the call to action is about slot preserving ghost flights.
Finally, it's a completely limp call to action, because the obvious solution (increase carbon taxes) is almost certainly unpalatable to the typical target audience of this article.
Would you mind humouring me for a moment? I have a strong suspicion (that I can’t prove) that this article was created by a primitive LLM.
I believe that because:
1.) The article presents ‘facts’ that are completely wrong with complete confidence. This alone really seriously smells like an LLM.
2.) Those ‘facts’ are based off of misread quotes from the source pubs. The misreading seems to relate back to words being removed entirely from analysis or else assigned the wrong definition.
I see few signs of human intelligence. What do you think? And for fun, assume the LLM is an adversary. How do we beat it?
If by primitive LLM you mean humans, you’d be correct. It’s low paid jobs to create content to decorate the ads surface and been a staple of the publishing industry for years, no LLM required.
No doubt these jobs will give way for LLMs down the road and even as we speak of course
I don’t know - I used to publish and maintain my interest in the publishing industry. This doesn’t sound anything like a human staffed content farm - they have their own works.
They are turning the international air travel treaty on it's head. This is the country's regulators fault not the carriers fault.
Australia bans carriers from flying domestic flights to protect their local carriers, but international carriers are allowed to make one connecting flight by treaty all over the world.
Presumably the flights are profitable or they wouldn't run them, but it's Australia's fault that you can't buy a ticket not the airline's fault.
Only part I don't understand is why not sell tickets if you're making that flight anyway? There are several direct flights between those two cities every day so there's at least some demand. Some people are flying that leg so you're still doing all the stuff you do when you do a commercial flight. Surely a little extra boarding/deplaning time is worth the fares you'd get.
Why not pack the plane and get the sales? I am sure there's a reason (it's too obvious to not have occurred to an airline to sell tickets on a flight) why they think it's not worth it, I am just curious what it is.
You can't legally sell domestic flights in a foreign country. (for these purposes, the EU is one country)
This is true for Australia, for India, for the USA, for the EU - an airline like Delta can fly to Sydney from LA but not sell domestic flights from Sydney to Melbourne. (Or, for that matter, international flights between Sydney and Singapore)
However, there is a catch! Airliners did not used to have quite the range they do today, and so the treaties allow things like refueling stops. And they (sometimes!) allow passengers to embark/disembark at those stops - but those passengers still have to be flying the international leg, or else it would be a domestic flight.
I am surprised few airlines set up subsidiary companies in other countries if this legal issue is almost universal. I've only ever interacted with airlines in the EU, so I had little to no idea how good I've had it.
Oh I see. So the few people on that last leg are just ones who booked a flight to Adelaide and they’re not allowed to sell more. I did not understand what parent meant about that but thanks that makes sense.
The article says a few passengers continue on to the final destination, so they’re not saving much in terms of crew / logistics.
Maybe it’s an attempt to avoid drawing too much attention from the regulator? If they started offering internal flights in Australia they’d be stepping even more on Qantas toes.
They did not sold tickets to the final destination, Adelaide. They only sold Doha-Melbourne. And now they sell Doha-Adelaide, with a long stop-over in Melbourne.
Loopholes are both parties’ fault. The regulators for forgetting or lacking foresight. And the perp’s for being slimy. Unfortunately being slimy isn’t illegal.
This practice is not slimy by the airline because everyone is getting exactly what they paid for. The passengers to Melbourne are getting a flight to Melbourne. The passengers to Adelaide are getting a flight to Adelaide.
The government is getting the industry protection from international competition that it wanted by banning the airlines from selling flights from Melbourne to Adelaide to fill the seats.
The airline wants to minimize empty seats and the government wants to allow domestic airlines to extract excess profit by protecting domestic airlines from competition but DGAF about empty seats. Therefore it is the governments fault that there are empty seats.
I don’t think optimizing revenues legally is slimy. If flying from wherever to Adelaide with a stop in Melbourne where most people deplane is both legal and profitable I’d hardly consider them slimy for doing it. Stupid regulations like the one necessitating this drive costs up for passengers.
In my opinion, the issue here lies entirely with the Australian government. International airlines including Qatar have been trying to buy additional slots into major Australian airports, but have been turned down with some pretty questionable reasoning around “protecting the Australian aviation industry” (see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-30/qantas-qatar-airways-... )
Meanwhile Qantas - a private company, who took over a billion AUD in government support during Covid are expected to pay the outgoing CEO over 20 million AUD in bonuses.
Having flown several times between Qatar and Australia in the last couple years, I don’t think I’ve had a single flight that wasn’t completely booked out. In comparison to the following legs to Europe which have been more like 75% full.
There is a real need for additional capacity on these routes (for those outside of Australia, the gulf countries, Hong Kong and Singapore are the most popular layover countries for Australians travelling to Europe, Africa and Asia due to their location) and the way I see it is that Qatar acknowledge that, tried to buy additional capacity and failing that have had to come up with some creative solutions to work around a government that values a sub-standard flag carriers profits over what’s best for the Australian consumer.
Australia has a very questionable history of this.
For decades imported cars have been hit with heavy import taxes to "protect the Australian Automobile manufacturing industry".
Now that no automobiles are manufactured in Australia (Ford and GM closed their plants), the heavy taxes have not gone away!
There is also the super-controversial "luxury car tax" of 33% on vehicles over approx. $80k.
Of course there is no luxury boat tax, luxury plane tax, luxury car tax, luxury watch tax or anything else of the sort.
Yeah, as a Kiwi, blew me away how your Japanese imports are always $2k - $3k more expensive than ours, ostensibly to protect Holden, which was owned by an American company!
Is that even a loophole? “You only get 28 flights with a final destination of Melbourne, and no cap on flights connecting through it” seems like it was designed to encourage this behavior.
It's a loophole, without any intent to encourage such behavior, if one of these rules was approved without anyone involved in the approval noticing that an existing rule allowed an exploitable workaround, or if it was assumed it would not be taken.
A great many security breaches and other errors come about this way, and one cannot automatically assume intent from it happening, though one can ask "what were you thinking?" if the possibility was noticed but dismissed.
>it’s on the aviation industry to rethink its policies on how airlines can keep their airport slots without causing further damage to the planet
With insane regulations, like those that forced airlines to schedule tens of thousands of empty flights to keep their airport slots during Covid?
No, it’s on regulators, not on the industry
>Lufthansa said it ran 18,000 empty flights in the winter of 2021-2022 to ensure it didn’t lose lucrative deals that gave its planes spots at major airports.
The 80/20 use-it-or-lose-it rule was relaxed in March 2020 in the US. Various countries handled things differently.
Airports and airlines are different industries. The Airports very much want companies to give up slots if they’re not going to fly those routes. As such these regulations are more a compromise between groups than something external.
> According to The National, German airline Lufthansa said it ran 18,000 empty flights in the winter of 2021-2022 to ensure it didn’t lose lucrative deals that gave its planes spots at major airports.
The airlines should be allowed to pay a fee equivalent to the cost of running the flight (or slightly less), rather than having to actually fly an empty plane.
If the competitor thought they could actually fill the flights, they could probably offer slightly less. Passengers probably represent a net profit for airports, so an airline sitting on slots and not using them represents an opportunity cost.
I agree this is on regulators, but you are still victimizing the exploiter. Nobody forced the airline to do this, rather they found this loophole and decided to exploit it. It is entirely their fault as the primary actor.
Of course you can also blame regulators for not being thorough enough (but honestly I would rather blame a lack of carbon pricing here)
>but honestly I would rather blame a lack of carbon pricing here
Why? Even if there was a carbon tax, and the carbon tax fully covered the cost of the the carbon emissions, the regulation in question is still actively harmful. It's encouraging resources to be used for no useful purpose, no different than regulation that encourages people to dig holes only to have them be filled back.
The price of flights to Melbourne has to be very high to make it profitable to also fly to Adelaide with <10% seats. You could say the people really demanded it.
I agree that this loophole should be closed, but maybe the way to close it is to just allow flights? I don't have a strong take, the original regulation must have been put into place for some reason; but it has a very real cost (which the passengers are happy to pony up for).
This is the problem. Capitalism will always choose “deals” and profit over important priorities like the environment and worker pay, safety, and lives.
I say, instead of less regulation, we nationalize all airline industry. Pull profit out of the equation.
The "deal" is mandated by a regulation. These companies couldn't choose the deal if the regulation putting forth the deal did not exist at all. As a sibling commenter noted, people (and organizations) respond to incentives.
When you make a regulation that incentivizes these companies to use up slots, they're going to do it simply because they know the competition will also do it, and if they do not, they lose. These rules were poorly planned, as they did not account for the incentives or the unintended consequences in the event that these flights did not actually have to occur. And after this happens, they're attempting to blame businesses for responding to the incentive.
Say I were to go into a crowded room and announce that I will give $10,000 to whoever breaks some specific person's nose. Who's to blame? Yeah, probably some combination of the people who took the money and especially me, who put forward the idea or "deal" that resulted in people taking action when they otherwise would not have done anything like this.
Or we could tax carbon and internalized the negative externality.
If you think that without capitalism we suddenly would take care of the environment, compare the destruction of the environment in communist countries to capitalist ones. Soviet Russia had a "nuclear lake" they just dumped nuclear waste into, Bitterfeld in the GDR was known for having it's creeks discolored from the chemicals dumped into them, the amount of smoke coming out of old, massive rural Chinese factories is hard to imagine if you haven't seen it; The Trabant spewed out orders of magnitude more exhausted than any western car. The problem isn't capitalism, but resource constraints.
> I say, instead of less regulation, we nationalize all airline industry. Pull profit out of the equation.
What you are proposing is for travelers to receive crappy service, no recourse for when the government employees don't feel like working and so on. Why on earth would you want this?
Ah yes, because operating it as a national service is really gonna make it sooo much better…
Removing all incentives is surely gonna make people want to do their best.
You know many counties originally had only a single or two nationalized airline and all of them were such money drains that the governments were all forced to privatize them to keep them afloat.
> Capitalism will always choose “deals” and profit over important priorities like the environment and worker pay, safety, and lives.
> I say, instead of less regulation, we nationalize all airline industry. Pull profit out of the equation.
Humans do not give a shit about anything other than their own incentives. Yes, even you and me. If you hand control to politicians, people will still act according to their incentives. There is absolutely nothing about capitalism that changes human behavior to be greedy - humans are greedy, whether it be for money or for social status.
Unfortunately, the people who weasel their way into power, more often than not, don’t have the same convictions as you regardless of whether it’s private or public sector.
At least I don’t have to be a customer of the private sector. Once things are nationalized, the same jerks are running the show based on incentives that are only aligned with their own prosperity, but now impact an entire constituency. Every time you hear a public servant talk about a problem with metrics that make no sense to solving the actual issues, their incentives become more obvious.
Then why is it that when I had a problem with the IRS that it was an absolute nightmare to solve. Even getting a person on the phone was difficult. But when I have a problem with an Amazon order, I can get a refund in a few clicks.
Turns out my power to choose to not be a customer gives me infinitely more power over a company than my right to vote gives me over a company.
Anyway, the rule of law should protect individual citizens. Government institutions or officials shouldn't get special treatment or protection. In case they do, then there's your problem. Not with the government entirely, but with the legislative branch (which companies are also subjected to).
The people making the rules will always get special treatment because having the power to make the rules requires having the power to grant oneself special treatment under them. And for the same reason, this is not a problem solvable by rules.
I don't care that Jeff Bezos gets better customer service from Amazon than me, or that some senators son can pick up the phone and talk to the head of the IRS. What I care about is that the service I get from the IRS is horrible and the service that I get from Amazon is good.
Perhaps you are right, but this point is irrelevant. Capitalism incentivizes and rewards this behavior, so you can expect more of it. A democratic government has different incentives and are rewarded for an entirely different set of behaviors.
Capitalism may not change the behavior of a single individual. But does certainly put the greediest to the top of society, and in aggregate you see more greediness among those that have the power to change things.
>Capitalism incentivizes and rewards this behavior, so you can expect more of it. A democratic government has different incentives and are rewarded for an entirely different set of behaviors.
Wait but is Australia not a democratic government? cue the inevitable "but it's not true [democracy/communism/capitalism]!"
Yes, Australia is a democratic government. I don’t understand where I’m claiming it isn’t. However the airline industry is not run by the Australian government, instead it is run by a for profit capitalist company (in this case the Qatar government), who’s intensive is to maximize the profit for their shareholder. The Austrialian government doesn’t even own the majority shares of the airline in question.
> There is absolutely nothing about capitalism that changes human behavior to be greedy - humans are greedy, whether it be for money or for social status.
For the vast majority of human history, humans have been cooperative and not greedy.
You’re making a spectacular claim without a source.
We’re arguably living in one of the most peaceful periods in history[0]. There are wars, but there is literally a political body where 193 of 195 countries regularly discuss issues with physical violence. Assuming violence is a proxy for greed, it’s quite a time to be alive (we’ll see how long it lasts).
I'm not sure how that would help here. The costs of tickets would go up proportionally, but the incentives to run the ghost flights would still be there.
It would make ghost flights more costly. This cost can't be recouped by increasing ticket prices because almost no one is on these flights, and it's unlikely that the few who take them will accept arbitrarily large fares.
The ghost flight already loses money. It exists to enable the flight to Melbourne to exist - it is essentially an additional cost to run that flight.
The increased cost would be passed on to the ticket prices of the Melbourne flight. The ghost flight would only be eliminated if the increased prices lower demand enough that the Melbourne flight (including the cost of running the ghost flight after it) becomes unprofitable.
From what I can see here, we agree that carbon pricing would make it harder to run ghost flights, it's just we can't be sure whether it would become impossible. That depends on the details.
But going back to my OP, I'm not that interested in ghost flights per se. I'm interested in the unnecessary CO2 they emit, and even there, mainly as a symptom of the broader problem of an unregulated, untaxed externality. I think this is the real reason to care about ghost flights.
Someone could also care about ghost flights out of aesthetic opposition to waste or regulatory arbitrage, but I'm not interested in that.
> "no ticket sales were permitted for domestic passengers to board the plane from Melbourne to Adelaide"
Isn't that relatively normal? I mean I think there are plenty of circumstances where an airline is permitted to fly internationally to a country, but it not permitted to operate (i.e sell tickets for) internal routes.
Yes - it's relatively normal - consecutive cabotage (aka "eighth freedom") means carrying passengers or cargo between two places in another country having started (or intending to end) the flight in your own country. So the MEL-ADL leg would have DOH-DEL-ADL would be an example of that for a Qatari flag carrier.
Cabotage as a whole is pretty unusual outside of integrated aviation markets like Europe. I would be very surprised if Qatar and Australia had an agreement that permitted it. In that absence of such an agreement, it would probably be illegal for QR to sell those tickets.
Very normal, it's protectionism so that local carriers e.g. quantas/jetstar have those locked down and not have foreign competition. Though Jet star is partially owned/operated by JAL and Quantas.
That last bit isn’t correct, Jetstar itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qantas. There is a smaller and separate ‘Jetstar Japan’ (a bit more than a quarter of the fleet size) that is partly owned by Qantas along with JAL and some other groups (including Mitsubishi Corporation) but that airline only flies domestically in Japan and internationally to a few countries in the area (Hong Kong, Phillipines, China, Taiwan).
The intention of many of these campaigns (like paper straws and paying attention to your individual carbon footprint) is, at least in part, to instill the idea that environmentalism should be all about individual action, rather than holding large companies to account for their role in pollution and environmental destruction.
Recycling at a personal level is a good idea—but it can only ever be a small part of a solution, and it also requires that recycling be taken seriously by the places that actually take the recyclables away—that they genuinely recycle the stuff, rather than just sending it to a landfill in some other country.
My favourite meme by now is with sad Keanu sitting on the bench "that's me looking at a paper straw seeping and turning useless while an (almost) empty jet leaves a trail up on the blue sky"
I agree that the optics of that situation aren't great, but what would you rather have him do? not preach environmentalism? If all rich people are chastised for supporting environmental movements, isn't that going to be worse for the environmental movement as a whole? The ideal scenario is that rich people both preach environmentalism and move to a zero impact permaculture commune, but that's not an unrealistic expectation. We can barely get environmental measures passed today, and that's with billionaires supporting the movement. I doubt shaming billionaires for supporting the movement is going to make things better.
The core problem is that you're making it harder to be an environment supporter. It's the equivalent telling the average Joe that if he supports the environment but still eats meat daily he's a hypocrite and should feel bad. The environmental impact of raising meat is well known, so advocating for environmental measures while not taking the trivial effort of not eating meat one day per week is pretty hypocritical as well. I'm not sure about you, but I'd rather have as broad support base as possible to get environmental measures promoted and passed, than a smaller group of diehard activists each trying to police each other on ideological purity.
The rich have both security and privacy concerns that make regular air travel problematic. Bill Gates sitting in an airport terminal is a danger to him, those around him, and is also a hassle to him and those around him.
There is the secondary factor of their time being too valuable as well, and having a direct flight to anywhere in the world making a big difference in how much time they spend.
some combination of using aviation biofuel (which in principle can be produced in a nearly carbon-neutral way) and buying non-fake carbon offsets (i.e., actually taking physical carbon out of the air) would probably be good enough.
this would further absurdly increase the cost of operating a private jet, but billionaires could still afford it.
This doesn’t bother me as much as it seems to bother others. I guess I just never got into the “only people who never do something wrong can advocate against wrongdoing” mindset.
Is it hypocritical? Sure, though I expect he has lots of reasons why it’s not. But is it better than not even giving lip service to the issue? Sure it is. But the fact that action isn’t good enough doesn’t mean it’s bad.
No, it is bad. He's basically saying "you peasants should give up the little you have so that we can save the planet without me having to give up anything".
Seems like a poor argument against environmentalism though. "That guy who said we should be nice to each other was mean to someone! Therefore being nice is stupid and we should all be as cruel as possible!"
You're speaking from the perspective of someone for whom the virtue of making personal sacrifices for environmental reasons is already obvious. Try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who doubts this. To those people, rich jetset climate activists come across like politicians who agitate against gay people then get caught having anonymous gay sex in airport bathrooms. Their hypocrisy is seen to invalidate the authenticity of their message.
You are right about the argument in itself. It is poor. But the argument is not in meat of the argument, but in optics. The perception of things as 'rules for me but not for thee' almost immediately overrules even basic logic. In other words, make pain even across the board and people might listen.
That’s because the link points to yahoo.com but the actual source is the Guardian. I can’t prove this but I suspect that yahoo.com uses a very primitive LLM to summarize articles from other pubs.
Here is the guardian story. There are paragraphs about the backlash:
The article seems to believe that only passengers are what fly on passenger airplanes. Many times on domestic routes cargo on these planes is more valuable than passengers. Occasionally even on international routes cargo is more valuable than passengers. I don't know about this specific case but clearly they were trying to get around the weekly cap but that doesn't mean the additional leg was a complete waste of resources because there's value in transporting cargo quickly from one area to another.
I was actually taking a Delta flight internationally and they were bumping passengers to make room for additional cargo. Due to the length of the flight and the takeoff weight restrictions that cargo was more valuable than the cheap seats that were paid for.
Don't the freedoms of the air that disallow the foreign airline from taking passengers boarding from Melbourne to Adelaide also disallow cargo on the same route? It seems unlikely that there is that big a discrepancy between passengers and cargo to a specific international connecting destination.
The article actually gives a completely different explanation: as a loophole to get around the cap on flights to Melb. Which is orthogonal to cargo vs passengers.
All airports have capacity constraints, there's the limit to how many planes can take-off/land, but also with how many gates and maintenance facilities they have. I actually support the idea of shifting some of this capacity to nearby airports, especially if it results in lower fares for passengers.
If I'm generous with their intentions, Australia were probably trying encourage tourism to smaller cities, bring business to local economies, increase competition on quieter routes, etc. Unfortunately it seems Qatar thought it easier/cheaper to fly the last leg empty instead of marketing tickets to the final destination.
For what it's worth, I actually flew London-Melbourne-Adelaide earlier this year. I booked a separate flight for MEL-ADL since it was cheaper than booking the whole trip through a single carrier.
Besides the environmental impact, I worry about these rules around "keeping slots" impacting competitiveness of the market. It sounds like incumbents keeping a slot is the default. How can a new competitor come in, be innovative and put real pressure on incumbents? Does this slot system make that easier or harder?
The word "skiplagging" feels like a word coined to make the practice seem dubious and plausibly illegal. Like "jaywalking."
Airlines exploit their customers, fail to disclose customer rights, and bend laws to their convenience all the time. The public would lose nothing if airlines were not bailed out every time there is a crisis. All the assets: The planes, the pilots, etc. could be subsidized through a crisis and acquired by new airlines and those wise enough to be be to survive a crisis. TBTF and "flag carriers" are welfare capitalism.
Question: What's the profitability to passenger ratio generally? Like is it linear? If so then this really isn't an airline problem it's a policy and customer problem. They are offering the flights as they are allowed by policy, which means it has to go to Adelaide, but customers don't want to fly there, so the plane is largely empty. If the customer demand was there then would the airline be so against selling more tickets like the article implies?
If it's not linear, and like 30% capacity is less profitable than both a full plane or a near empty plane, then sure the airline could be abusing policy loopholes. I wonder if the policy penalizes cancellations then? Like what if the airline wanted to cancel these "ghost flights" for the sake of being more green? So they just always canceled the last leg.
Flying the mostly empty legs allows them to fly more times on the routes people want to go. Increasing supply on those routes should reduce passenger cost, even if the extra flight increases the airline cost.
For example, one flight from Doha, Qatar, to Melbourne had an additional stop in the Australian city of Adelaide, which was registered as the final destination. Passengers would disembark the aircraft in Melbourne, but a few would remain in the terminal to make the final leg to Adelaide. (...)
In this case, Qatar Airways was making these extra journeys to avoid caps that allow it to make only 28 weekly trips to Australia’s major airports, which includes Melbourne. Landing at Adelaide Airport, which is not among that list, as the final destination enabled the airline to make additional journeys to Melbourne, as there were no limits on flights to non-major airports.
It's also funny because by fusing together a bunch of semi-unrelated stories, you end up bizarre combinations. The majority of the article isn't about airlines flying empty flights to keep their slots, it's about Qatar straight up avoiding taking up 'slots' (of sorts), but the call to action is about slot preserving ghost flights.
Finally, it's a completely limp call to action, because the obvious solution (increase carbon taxes) is almost certainly unpalatable to the typical target audience of this article.