Airlines flying near-empty ‘ghost flights’ to retain EU airport slots
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 cut the benchmark for flight operations that airlines must meet to keep their slots open from 80% to 25%.
But last December, Brussels upped the benchmark to 50%, rising 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
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