Why London's Heathrow Airport Sometimes Hosts 'Ghost Flights' With No One on Them (jalopnik.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Six times per week, an empty plane used to fly from London's Heathrow Airport to Cardiff, Wales. The next day, the plane would make the return trip without a single passenger. Half As Interesting, the second channel from Planelopnik-approved Wendover Productions, details why ghost flights like this sometimes operate from Britain's biggest airport in his new video. Despite being one of the most crowded airports in the world, Heathrow operates with only two runways. As a result, it's extremely difficult to get a "slot pair" -- rights for airlines to land and take off at a certain time. Only 650 slot pairs exist per day, so airlines are prepared to drop massive cash in order to get prime slot pairs. And they can trade and sell them, too. [...] Should an airline fail to use their slot at least 80 percent of the time, Heathrow will reassign it to the next company on the waiting list.

Comments

Re:Answer

[Joce640k]

Notice the lack of a question mark in the summary? That means it wasn't a question.

A question would be: "Why Does London's Heathrow Airport Sometimes Hosts 'Ghost Flights' With No One on Them?"

Re:I'm taking bets

[Nidi62]

I used to work on the ramp of a major airport and let me tell you, those tanks they kept in the cargo holds to store the chemicals were great. The chemicals have to be kept at a constant temperature so the tanks were always cool during the summer and warm during the winter. Good place to relax by if you had some downtime.

Re: Answer

[Nidi62]

I suspect that the problem with building more runways is acquiring the land from the people who live or have businesses on the land. that could get expensive

There's currently a fight going on over the construction of a 3rd runway. The House of Commons last month voted approval but local officials including London's mayor are contesting it and asking for a judicial review.

Re: I'm taking bets

[UnknowingFool]

The problem with many of these conspiracy theories is that they often ignore details like logistics which are required to make everything run every single day. Let's take the example of chemtrails.

The premise is that it is a wide conspiracy that commercial airliners are used to spray extremely potent chemicals into the air at 30,000+ ft. This is extremely unlikely given the many groups that are involved in just loading the chemicals in a plane.

• Airline pilots because they have to not report the nozzles they find when they visually inspect their planes preflight and also doctor all the paperwork when an extra 1000+ lbs of chemicals is added to a flight.
• Maintanence crew who have to ignore/hide the tanks, nozzles, etc that are attached to every plane when servicing planes.
• Ground personnel who have to fill these tanks or ignore the personnel who are filling these tanks who btw are probably wearing full Hazmat suits to avoid poisoning and contamination.
• Accountants at the airline who have to account for weight on every plane for fuel costs.

Of those four groups of people, ground personnel and maintenance may not even work for the airline and are mostly likely airport employees and some may be government workers and possibly union workers. So just to load an airplane with chemicals require multiple groups which are private and public employees and may be part of unions to turn a blind eye or outright hide the process.