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Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

businessinsider.com

111–120 of 364 posts

Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

#111

I feel like there's a short-term solution to this: You can keep your slot and not fly the plane, as long as you pay some large percentage* of the cost of each ghost trip to the organisation that'd resell your slot. Your 'flight' must be fully crewed. That way the carbon isn't emitted, (some) jobs are kept secure, and the airline recoups a little of the money they would have otherwise lost.

Makes sense. As the saying goes: "Tax the inelastic".

Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

#112

Covid 19 is a good opportunity for extremely sensible change. Lets all stop needlessly flying, lets all work from home (if your just doing an office job anyway), lets use local products and not stuff from half way across the world.

A decent percentage of people put food on the table and a roof over their head by doing a job we could classify as needless

And that's an adequate justification for polluting the environment?

Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

#115

Ironic. I had heard tales of the old Soviet Union about trains running empty to fill distance quotas. It was presented as the ultimate proof of how messed up their system was.

Never heard that, why would they in planed economy?

Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

#116

The airlines that are stockpiling capacity at our expense will come hat in hand for a bailout at our expense.

Except there won’t be money available when they ask for it. When the dollar collapses after the Fed cuts rates, the interest rate will rise very high. The government will be forced to cut spending, and there will be no bailouts this time.

Right now rates are very low.

Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

#117
post #81

I’ve been waiting for airlines to give up on scheduling altogether and move to JIT routing. Maintaining schedules seems fragile, and I think demand would increase dramatically if customers didn’t have to plan ahead. This will definitely happen when the industry gets disrupted by cheap autonomous and electric mini-planes, but it seems that schedules are so broken already that the biggest thing keeping up the facade ar…

> I think demand would increase dramatically if customers didn’t have to plan ahead

I think customers won't be a fan of showing up and waiting 17 hours or whatever until the next flight has enough people to fly.

> This will definitely happen when the industry gets disrupted by cheap autonomous and electric mini-planes

Battery energy density is a looooong way from matching jet fuel, especially since the weight of the carried jet fuel doesn't have to include the oxygen to react with. And smaller planes are less efficient. I don't see this happening.

Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

#118
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just mindlessly trolling here or do you have a point? Climate change is a thing that concerns people. Waste is a thing that concerns people. Is any of this surprising?

Do those two things concern people as much as you think? I don't see it as a major issue people vote on.

Not a lot of people vote primarily on issues regarding criminal justice or technology (e.g. backdoor encryption) and yet I do think we should care about those things.

Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

#119
post #115

Ironic. I had heard tales of the old Soviet Union about trains running empty to fill distance quotas. It was presented as the ultimate proof of how messed up their system was.

Never heard that, why would they in planed economy?

In authoritarian states you frequently get situations where you're punished for not meeting certain bureaucratic metrics. For example, in China word is factory output is used as a proxy for productivity, so they're allegedly running factories without producing anything just to raise the power bill to appear productive.

Face is ingrained in Chinese culture partly because in an authoritarian state where your behavior must fall within rigidly defined qualitative and quantitative metrics, appearances are everything.

Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak

#120
post #115

Ironic. I had heard tales of the old Soviet Union about trains running empty to fill distance quotas. It was presented as the ultimate proof of how messed up their system was.

Never heard that, why would they in planed economy?

Politics and the impact of bureaucracy?

It was common that quotas were created by leadership who were often not close enough to the need to properly design the quota. That got passed down through multiple layers of management, all of whom could care less if the trains were full and were more interested in meeting the quota so could advance in their career.

People complain about unethical behavior in capitalist systems, but that's not a property of capitalism, that's a property of humans.

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