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.
This is just another instance of the classic Soviet problem. A scarce resource is allocated by a government bureaucracy instead of a market, and the bureaucracy's design is imperfect, so nonsensical incentives fall out of it sometimes. There's no irony. It's just kind of quirky for the West to manage flight/landing slots this way, instead of an auction (as the FCC does with spectrum).
I used to work for a consulting company and heard similar stories for IT budgets. Companies nearing the end of financial year with budget to spare would scramble to get more consultants in to spend the remainder, otherwise the following year their budget would be scaled back to whatever they actually spent.