At least 100,000 ghost flights could be flown this winter, Greenpeace says

According to Greenpeace, at least 100,000 ghost flights could be flown across Europe this winter because of EU airport slot usage rules.

The deserted, unprofitable flights are intended to allow airlines to keep 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.

Herwig Schuster, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace's European Mobility for All campaign, said that the EU Commission requiring airlines to fly empty planes to meet arbitrary quotas is not only polluting, but extremely hypocritical.

Transport emissions are skyrocketing, he said. It would be irresponsible for the EU to not take the low hanging fruit of ending ghost flights and banning short-haul flights where there is a reasonable train connection. When the Covid epidemic began, the European Commission cut the benchmark for flight operations that airlines must meet to keep their slots open from 80% to 25%.

In December, Brussels increased the benchmark to 50%, increasing it to 64% in March.

Carsten Spohr, CEO of Lufthansa, said that his airline may have to fly 18,000 extra flights in order to meet the adjusted rules, and called for the sort of climate-friendly exemptions used in other parts of the world.

Between January and March 2021, only 45% of its flights were full, according to a spokesman for Lufthansa.

The spokesperson added that the other 5% of the 18,000 flights were unnecessary. If we wouldn't risk the loss of slots in certain European airports, we probably would have cancelled them and put them together with other existing flights. Greenpeace applied Lufthansa's proportion of ghost flights to other European airlines based on the German carrier's 17% market share, using a conservative estimate of 20 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a flight.

The research assumed an average flight time of 90 minutes by a 200 seater plane, over a distance of 800 -- 1,000 km.

Tim Johnson, the director of the Aviation Environment Federation, said that the assumptions of Greenpeace were spot on. It looks like an example of waste in the industry and I think people will be surprised by the scale of it. It hints at a real problem of airlines having to operate either empty or very low-occupancy flights in order to maintain their slots. Socialist MEPs in the European Parliament have demanded answers to the problem, and Greta Thunberg, the climate strike leader, has sardonically claimed that the EU is in a climate emergency mode. The European Commission denies that air carriers are operating ghost flights or that they use it or lose it slot rules have caused problems.

A Commission spokeswoman said that empty flights are bad for the economy and the environment and that we took several measures allowing companies to not have empty flights. If airline companies decide to keep empty flights, this is a company decision, which is not a result of EU rules. Brussels argues that it has already cut slot requirements and that airlines can request that even those are slowed if flights are disrupted by severe sanitary measures such as new government travel restrictions.

Earlier this month, Ryanair CEO Michael O Leary complained that big airlines benefited from generous EU breaks, and now Lufthansa is not happy. They don't want to operate ghost flights because: Ohhh, the environment he told Politico.

The Irish airline wants Lufthansa to sell unused tickets at cheap prices and to force it to release unused slots, according to the cut-price Irish airline.

Air France wants more slot rule flexibility, but a spokesman said it wouldn't give any data on how many under-capacity and unnecessary flights it was currently flying.

Johnson said that it was right to focus on climate impacts when huge amounts of CO were being emitted unnecessarily, but there was a wider industry battle that pointed to the need for slot reform.

He said we need something that genuinely rewards efficiency. A sort of efficiency metric is used to allocate slots that would allow an operator with a modern full plane to be preferred over rival carriers that are operating with much lower load factors or older technologies.