At this point of the climate crisis, there’s no excuse for ‘ghost flights’

A petition is calling for the eradication of the practice of flying empty planes – and about time too, writes Helen Coffey

Ghost flights are when planes fly empty to keep a route active (iStock)

If I were to tell you that, over the next couple of months, one single airline group is gearing up to operate 18,000 completely empty flights, you might have questions. Questions like: What the actual f***?

I’m with you, buddy. It doesn’t make much sense to me either. And yet that’s exactly what Lufthansa Group – which owns airlines including Lufthansa, Brussels Airlines, Swiss International Airlines and Austrian Airlines – announced it was doing. And it’s far from the only one. Other major flag carriers all over Europe will be running similar schedules of passenger-less planes – a phenomenon known as “ghost flights” .

So, why on earth are they doing it? It’s an expensive business, getting an aircraft airborne – and the only thing that makes it financially worthwhile is a high load-factor of fully paid-up travellers.

But the absurd practice is born of necessity: EU rules stipulate that airlines must use a certain percentage of their designated “slots” for takeoffs and landings at major airports, or risk being stripped of them. Pre-pandemic, this “use ’em or lose ’em” policy applied to 80 per cent of slots.

This has been reduced to 50 per cent during Covid times – a target that is still proving an uphill struggle for airlines, what with never-ending restrictions, rule changes and travel bans dampening passenger demand to the point where capacity has shrunk to a shadow of that seen before coronavirus reshaped the world.

Carriers’ hands are therefore tied: should they fail to make use of their slots, they risk losing them for good. And, for legacy airlines and flag carriers, such as Lufthansa, prime slots at the most prominent European airports are one of their most valuable assets. Hence the abominable practice of operating “ghost flights”.

At this point in the climate crisis, it beggars belief that this is still happening – pointless carbon emissions, along with all the other chemicals released in flight that also have a warming effect, being jettisoned into the atmosphere for no reason whatsoever. I haven’t set foot on a plane since 2019 for environmental reasons, but I acknowledge that some flights are necessary – we can’t eradicate them all.

But ghost flights are an even bigger travesty than the “flights to nowhere” – whereby travellers took off on sight-seeing tours by plane before landing exactly back where they started – which became trendy amid widespread international travel bans in 2020.

Anna Hughes, founder of the Flight Free UK movement that encourages Brits to pledge to stop flying for a year, certainly thought so. She’s launched a petition calling on the UK government to end the practice of ghost flights, telling The Independent: “Flying planes empty is a waste of fuel, and at a time of climate crisis it’s a needless source of emissions. We should be doing everything we can to reduce emissions, not fly planes around empty just to keep landing slots.

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“We don’t know how long Covid is going to be with us, but in the long term we need to consider this: we want people to see that their behaviour makes a difference. The market needs to reflect consumer habits, and if fewer people are choosing to fly because of the climate crisis, we would like to see airlines adapt to those patterns – not just carry on flying planes empty.

“Airlines are currently making a mockery of people’s well-intentioned efforts to reduce their own emissions, and this is the opposite message to what we need right now.”

The petition has already hit 5,255 signatures at the time of writing. Whether you’re flight-free or a frequent jet setter, I think we can all agree that filling the sky with empty planes flies in the face of common sense.

Yours,

Helen Coffey

Travel editor