In March and September of 2020, airlines flew close to empty planes from UK airports to keep their landing and takeoff slots. In the face of a climate emergency, this behavior cannot continue. Tim Johnson from the Aviation Environment Federation points out that the dominant aircraft on short-haul routes emits about 18 tonnes of carbon dioxide on a 1,500 km flight. 270,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas was put into the atmosphere by ghost flights. In a world with net zero commitments, the practice of less than 1% of total UK aviation emissions is completely wrong.
In normal times, airlines can keep their slots from the previous season if they use them 80% of the time. When Covid struck, demand for air travel suddenly disappeared and international borders closed, but has gradually increased. Use or lose the slots on the basis. Planes are being flown to keep slots because demand is low. More than 100,000 ghost flights will be seen over Europe this winter. The green pressure group says that the climate damage is equivalent to the yearly emissions of more than a million cars.
Airlines need ghost flights to keep hold of slots because they care more about financial than the Earth. IAG valued its slots at three major hubs of London, Madrid and Dublin at over one billion dollars. SAS sold two slot pairs at the airport to American Airlines for $75 million. In 2015, Virgin Atlantic borrowed 220 million dollars against its slots. In highly financialised societies, the worth of companies listed on stock markets is dependent on assets, earnings and profits.
Unless politicians understand that increasing wellbeing is more important than the growth in the value of transactions, the way slots are allocated will not change. GDP growth is similar to that of an oil spill, thanks to ghost flights. Both can generate business. Selling more spare slots to aid new entrants is not the answer. That is a corporate deal.
The view is that economies should expand by 2% a year. doubling the economy's size every 35 years is what this means. This doesn't take into account the fact that economic activity begins with the extraction of natural resources, that it doesn't increase human enjoyment, and that it can be damaging in terms of inequality. The UN suggests that growth that does more harm than good should be treated as an end in itself.
The cost to the natural world of running empty flights is very high. There is a need to replace the economic and financial systems that don't account for the benefits that humanity derives from nature.
According to a study done by the University of Leeds, no country has met the basic needs of its residents without over consuming natural resources. Over the next 30 years, no country will do anything to perpetuate human deprivation and ecological breakdown. The broken system for allocating airport slots is not the only problem.
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