How would the auction work? For example, how often? I guess the airline need stability in their schedules. I don't know what incentivizes airports to take the "use it or lose it" model, it I'd be curious to understand that, because it must be at the center of this.
I agree of course that if a flight is happening only to maintain a slot then it's a ridiculous outcome. But as others have pointed out, there is cargo, plus pilots keeping current, plus keeping the plane in service (I dont believe you can just park a plane for months and then bring it into service again without a lot of work). Lots of procedures have been established under the premise of regular flights and it's not so simple to just rework all of them is my guess.
Something like 5 or 10 years would work well. If an airline can't make the route work, they could then sell what's left of their slot to someone else - including to a cargo airline like DHL, FedEx, or even Amazon Air.
Under the current system, legacy carriers got their slots for free or very cheap so they do wasteful things to keep their slots. They've been using smaller than optimal planes for years, and since the pandemic started the empty planes thing has gotten more common.
Airports benefit from having passengers come in, and so part of use it or lose it is ensuring that at very busy airports slots are as full as possible. Upstarts can and will take slots at such airports because they are worth their weight in gold; LHR to JFK makes $1B in annual profit for British Airways alone, for example.
Airports also benefit from stability, though; airlines taking up a large percentage of traffic at a hub drive more traffic than if all those slots were split due to network effects. And to some degree people who transit airports tend to transit the same ones, so there are downsides to hectic, constant auctions of slots.
The main issue is that COVID has made demand totally dry up across the board, and so the inherent assumption, that giving away a slot will bring in passenger traffic where there is none, has fallen apart.
The beauty of using supply&demand to sort out all these conflicting priorities using price as the discriminator is it works better than any bureaucratic system ever has.
The reason for this regulation existing is that in the past airlines could shut down competition by buying gates. Because many of the big airports have gates assigned to specific carriers, so if there aren’t any gates for a new airline to buy/lease/whatever then that airline can’t land at that airport.
While the airlines are saying we need to do this so that the gates are available when demand returns, what they’re actually doing is making it impossible for any new airlines to start up.
Basically the cost of these empty flights is less than the cost of competition from a new carrier.
Dedicated gates are much less common in Europe than it is in the US; slot-limited airports tend to much more be about runway slots than they are about gate capacity, and increasingly many airports in Europe are limited by runway capacity with little (politically) realistic chance of expansion.
But yes, fundamentally it's a case of the cost of operation being lower than the risk posed by new airlines.
So, perhaps instead of making the flight, the airlines should be allowed to pay a tax equal to 80% of whatever it costs to actually operate the flight?
I’m unsure - some of these are triangular routes, A-B, B-C, C-A.
While A-B might empty, you need the plan landed on B to take the other two routes…
I worked a few months for an Airline and IMHO it’s one of the most complex operational model I ever saw. Fuel, weight, different fueling prices per location, dynamic pricing, crew management, climate, route management, maintenance, green laws, …
No, I am not sure. An airport’s purpose is to fly passengers. I don’t really want a mechanism for airlines to pay just to have empty gates. Isn’t that kind of dystopian? Shuttered gates, paid for by Delta to ensure its monopoly?
It's the airport equivalent of a land tax: making people pay for hogging scarce resources is a strong incentive to either use them or sell them off to somebody else who will.
I'm sure this could be worked out using some combination of paying for the slot and requiring a minimum amount of passengers/cargo. Exact numbers would require some tuning by people who know about this but doesn't seem impossible to get right. E.g. have airlines pay a fee for any empty seat below an 80% full plane.
Having planes fly empty to maintain a monopoly is just bad all around
I came here to write something like that.. The headline outs Lufthansa as doing something wrong, well, their action is idiotic in the greater scheme of things, but it's entirely reasonable within the constraints of the system in which they must operate.
The trouble with auctions — and I admit this may be a trigger response to the specific example of cell phone radio spectrum — is that the participants who have mountains of capital will use it to price out competitors and new upstarts.
> the participants who have mountains of capital will use it to price out competitors and new upstarts.
Lufthansa's interest is piqued. They already price out competitors, they've bought many smaller airlines (even the "national" airlines Swiss and Austria) and operate them at slim to negative margins to keep the workers quiet (the threat of bankruptcy prevents them from rebelling too much)..
Isn't maintaining the slot more about making sure there's a plane in the right place at the right time if somebody wants to buy a ticket on a scheduled flight at the last minute? A bus wouldn't change route because it was empty. There might be somebody at the next stop.
A large airline could probably manage this better but if a smaller airline (city hoppers, especially) sacked off empty flights, they might not have the inventory or pilots to manage future legs.
I'm not arguing against action. The current situation is ludicrous.
I think one of the reasons why this system exists is to keep airlines from buying slots they will not use, which could both be anti-competitive and bad for the airport (passengers = money, planes = service, support, fuel, etc).
That's all fine in normal times but in a pandemic crisis (or environmental crisis) it's very silly.
There's whole economy around the flight. Ground handling, refuelling, passenger services etc. Charge for an unused flight slot would have to account for all of that too.
Lufthansa is not without blame here, but they're just responding to incentives from European administrators - the same people that brought you "chopping down America's forests to be burned in European power plants, because they'll grow back so it's green!" [1]
I won't speak to how the previous poster intended the phrase, but the correct takeaway from "just responding to incentives" isn't that it morally justifies anything, it's closer to "what the hell did you expect?". In that sense, I suppose it is much like "just following orders". You would have to be very naive to think that not accepting "just following orders" as a defense will lead to atrocities not happening when the people in power actually order them.
When people say "they're just responding to incentives", what they often imply is that we should be changing the incentives, or going after the people who made those incentives. I think that's true on both a practical and moral level.
On a practical level, we are not going to get a corporation to make less money, for the most part, by appeals to morality. It just doesn't work. Changing the incentives absolutely does work. Both of these have been proven time and again.
On a moral level, I really don't think it's the fault of companies when they respond to incentives. We have a society in which people elect representatives to pass laws and regulations. If they pass bad laws and regulations and people follow them, then it's the regulators' fault, not the people they regulate. You can't have every person in the system enacting their own idea of morality - partially because they don't have the complete picture, partially because they don't have the same morality, partially because any company that decides to change how it behaves without the regulations themselves changing will just be outcompeted in most cases.
The one big caveat to that is that companies have a pretty massive amount of influence on the regulators themselves, and they can definitely use that influence in moral or immoral ways.
It is always easy to say that someone else should go out of business to save the planet for you.
I often see this on HN in form of "working on X thing is immoral and everyone should just quit and not accept that work" and it makes the commenter feel superior to all the immoral people who work on immoral projects all the while forgetting that people just want to put food on the table.
In case it is not painfully obvious to you by now: YOU would have also been following orders had you been there.
Regulation is as challenging as adding features to complex software systems. Achieving the desired outcome without causing any undesired consequences is very hard.
In some ways, it's even harder than adapting complex software systems: At least software systems don't commonly consist of subsystems with independent, self-interest-seeking goal structures that lobby you during design for features they favor or exploit latent defects post-deployment.
No one [in the west] cares about the [lack of consumption] of places like the Gaza Strip, Central African Republic, Chad, and so on. A headline referring to the consumption of Gaza or CAR would be rather obtuse with how little people know about the difficulties of either countries/areas. CAR being in perpetual civil war, Gaza being a land locked ghetto.
Palestine and CAR roughly use a bit more than a combined 200 Gigawatt hours/year. That’s low double digits kilowatt hours/yer/person.
For some context, the US uses 5 megawatt hours/year/person. That’s under 50K average electricity usage per year per person outdoing both countries with a combined population closing in on 150x. Obviously this is oversimplifying things but outdoing energy, carbon emissions, what have you, of a number of countries wouldn’t be difficult.
Paper straws are generally more energy and resource intensive than plastic straws.
The switch to paper straws was theoretically about eliminating single use plastics.
As someone who has done scientific surveys of beach flotsam: my personal feeling is that the switch to paper straws will change precisely nothing as far as global plastic pollution goes.
I was thirsty at a popup in a park recently and they handed me boxed water. Since I really hate the taste of water passing through cardboard I asked for a single use plastic cup, preferably with a single use plastic straw. In those words.
Nature quickly healed.
I pretended that using the recycling bin would change something, but I know that nobody takes our garbage anymore.
That many flights probably does match the fossil fuel consumption of some countries with low levels of electrification. What a tremendous waste of resources.
Funnily enough Lufthansa cancelled two of my flights in 2020. Their solution to avoid refunds was to completely remove my bookings from their system and assumes it no longer exists. Their local representative is clueless, their phone support never answers and there is no way to contact a human being there.
But now I get why: They have been busy flying empty planes.
I can't blame them too much though. They are trying to cope up with regulations and their competitors are fierce.
> These Regulations make three changes in relation to slots allocated for the scheduling period which
runs from 31st October 2021 to 26th March 2022 ...
> the list of reasons on the basis of which non-utilisation of slots can be justified, which appears in
Article 10(4) of the Regulation, is expanded to include certain government-imposed measures
related to COVID-19 which severely reduce the viability of, or demand for passenger travel
on, the route in question.
It's literally in the begining of the article, the regulations were adapted for COVID, but it was apparently insufficient. Do you have any valid criticism of the regulation or is it just "bad" because "Europe"?
> meanwhile, in a country that left the EU
At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small.
relaxing these requirements during a period of heavily restricted air travel is an objectively correct policy
the organisation's institutional inflexibility/political inability to solve this very simple problem is yet another demonstration of the EU's current structure being unfit for purpose (or able to respond in a timely manner to current events)
> At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small.
there are plenty
note that any perceived negative changes are immediately reported as a direct consequence of leaving
however the converse is not true: positive changes don't tend to be reported as a direct consequence of leaving
make of this what you will
(and unsurprisingly: it takes a while to see the effects of more responsive and accountable governance)
Good stuff, though from my understanding a slot is a airport allocation to land/take off. So an airline would have slots at the departure and destination airports and with that, some would be forced to make the flights to cater for the other end connection.
This existed pre-COVID but is more of a thing now. See Half as Interesting - Why Heathrow Airport Had Empty Flights to Nowhere (3 years ago, pre-covid) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8XZriAdB1g
While it's a small percentage of overall flights worldwide this is just wrong. Laws are complex but why waste this huge amount of resources and add to global warming.
Readit News
Of course, the correct way to allocate slots is to auction them off.
I agree of course that if a flight is happening only to maintain a slot then it's a ridiculous outcome. But as others have pointed out, there is cargo, plus pilots keeping current, plus keeping the plane in service (I dont believe you can just park a plane for months and then bring it into service again without a lot of work). Lots of procedures have been established under the premise of regular flights and it's not so simple to just rework all of them is my guess.
Under the current system, legacy carriers got their slots for free or very cheap so they do wasteful things to keep their slots. They've been using smaller than optimal planes for years, and since the pandemic started the empty planes thing has gotten more common.
Airports also benefit from stability, though; airlines taking up a large percentage of traffic at a hub drive more traffic than if all those slots were split due to network effects. And to some degree people who transit airports tend to transit the same ones, so there are downsides to hectic, constant auctions of slots.
The main issue is that COVID has made demand totally dry up across the board, and so the inherent assumption, that giving away a slot will bring in passenger traffic where there is none, has fallen apart.
AFAIK airports charge airlines start and landing fees. By threatening airlines to loose their slots they ensure their steady revenue stream.
Keeping pilots current and keeping planes in service? At least down to 10% slot use, I'd be surprised if that's a real issue.
While the airlines are saying we need to do this so that the gates are available when demand returns, what they’re actually doing is making it impossible for any new airlines to start up.
Basically the cost of these empty flights is less than the cost of competition from a new carrier.
But yes, fundamentally it's a case of the cost of operation being lower than the risk posed by new airlines.
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While A-B might empty, you need the plan landed on B to take the other two routes…
I worked a few months for an Airline and IMHO it’s one of the most complex operational model I ever saw. Fuel, weight, different fueling prices per location, dynamic pricing, crew management, climate, route management, maintenance, green laws, …
It’s full of challenges.
Having planes fly empty to maintain a monopoly is just bad all around
http://travelweekly.co.uk/articles/324401/heathrow-slot-auct...
Lufthansa's interest is piqued. They already price out competitors, they've bought many smaller airlines (even the "national" airlines Swiss and Austria) and operate them at slim to negative margins to keep the workers quiet (the threat of bankruptcy prevents them from rebelling too much)..
IIRC (and correct me if I'm wrong) if a commercial pilot goes a long time without flying they'd need to spend some time to retrain or something?
A large airline could probably manage this better but if a smaller airline (city hoppers, especially) sacked off empty flights, they might not have the inventory or pilots to manage future legs.
I'm not arguing against action. The current situation is ludicrous.
Competition can't possibly enter once a market has been established, thus the customer ultimately loses.
That's all fine in normal times but in a pandemic crisis (or environmental crisis) it's very silly.
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... on the blockchain.
:sigh:
I truly despise the global administrative class.
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/4/18216045/ren...
I don’t care if they made money, it’s still immoral.
Edit: thank god I recycled some cans today.
When people say "they're just responding to incentives", what they often imply is that we should be changing the incentives, or going after the people who made those incentives. I think that's true on both a practical and moral level.
On a practical level, we are not going to get a corporation to make less money, for the most part, by appeals to morality. It just doesn't work. Changing the incentives absolutely does work. Both of these have been proven time and again.
On a moral level, I really don't think it's the fault of companies when they respond to incentives. We have a society in which people elect representatives to pass laws and regulations. If they pass bad laws and regulations and people follow them, then it's the regulators' fault, not the people they regulate. You can't have every person in the system enacting their own idea of morality - partially because they don't have the complete picture, partially because they don't have the same morality, partially because any company that decides to change how it behaves without the regulations themselves changing will just be outcompeted in most cases.
The one big caveat to that is that companies have a pretty massive amount of influence on the regulators themselves, and they can definitely use that influence in moral or immoral ways.
I often see this on HN in form of "working on X thing is immoral and everyone should just quit and not accept that work" and it makes the commenter feel superior to all the immoral people who work on immoral projects all the while forgetting that people just want to put food on the table.
In case it is not painfully obvious to you by now: YOU would have also been following orders had you been there.
Is it really immoral to follow orders that were issued by an entity that has a monopoly on violence?
You should not receive order that are inhumane. And you should not have regulation set up in a way that bad behavior makes you money.
Are these the same people that turned off Germany's nuclear plants so they could import fossil fuels instead?
In some ways, it's even harder than adapting complex software systems: At least software systems don't commonly consist of subsystems with independent, self-interest-seeking goal structures that lobby you during design for features they favor or exploit latent defects post-deployment.
We should make headlines this way all the time
Palestine and CAR roughly use a bit more than a combined 200 Gigawatt hours/year. That’s low double digits kilowatt hours/yer/person.
For some context, the US uses 5 megawatt hours/year/person. That’s under 50K average electricity usage per year per person outdoing both countries with a combined population closing in on 150x. Obviously this is oversimplifying things but outdoing energy, carbon emissions, what have you, of a number of countries wouldn’t be difficult.
The switch to paper straws was theoretically about eliminating single use plastics.
As someone who has done scientific surveys of beach flotsam: my personal feeling is that the switch to paper straws will change precisely nothing as far as global plastic pollution goes.
Nature quickly healed.
I pretended that using the recycling bin would change something, but I know that nobody takes our garbage anymore.
But now I get why: They have been busy flying empty planes.
I can't blame them too much though. They are trying to cope up with regulations and their competitors are fierce.
meanwhile, in a country that left the EU:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2021/1200/made/data.pdf
> These Regulations make three changes in relation to slots allocated for the scheduling period which runs from 31st October 2021 to 26th March 2022 ...
> the list of reasons on the basis of which non-utilisation of slots can be justified, which appears in Article 10(4) of the Regulation, is expanded to include certain government-imposed measures related to COVID-19 which severely reduce the viability of, or demand for passenger travel on, the route in question.
It's literally in the begining of the article, the regulations were adapted for COVID, but it was apparently insufficient. Do you have any valid criticism of the regulation or is it just "bad" because "Europe"?
> meanwhile, in a country that left the EU
At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small.
"apparently insufficient" doesn't count as bad?
relaxing these requirements during a period of heavily restricted air travel is an objectively correct policy
the organisation's institutional inflexibility/political inability to solve this very simple problem is yet another demonstration of the EU's current structure being unfit for purpose (or able to respond in a timely manner to current events)
> At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small.
there are plenty
note that any perceived negative changes are immediately reported as a direct consequence of leaving
however the converse is not true: positive changes don't tend to be reported as a direct consequence of leaving
make of this what you will
(and unsurprisingly: it takes a while to see the effects of more responsive and accountable governance)
So I had a dig and see if the EU did anything and they did it seems - https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021...
Though it does seem that the results are mixed and good coverage here: https://www.airportwatch.org.uk/2022/01/european-airlines-ha...
RealLifeLore2 also covered the same topic as the original submission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR1a_LO4hSk