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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.
I had never heard of such a thing until a couple of months ago when someone posted on Nextdoor that there were a lot of 'chemtrails' that day. I corrected him that condensation trails was condensed to 'contrails' and for my trouble got a wild rant about what a naive fool I was to not know about how my mind was being controlled by government spraying. It seemed to me in his case more medication was needed.
True capitalism would have the airport auction off EVERY departure time on the schedule on a daily basis, thank you very much. Actual economies have "friction" which render them sub-optimal. And yes, government bureaucracy is a huge source of friction.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Amazing that the carbon footprint of unnecessary jet fuel expenditures isn't even brought into question.
It's ridiculous that Slashdot allows summary edits but still not post edits.
True capitalism would have the airport auction off EVERY departure time on the schedule on a daily basis, thank you very much. Actual economies have "friction" which render them sub-optimal. And yes, government bureaucracy is a huge source of friction.
You are correct. True Capitalism would encourage one or two companies to purchase all the slots, and gouge travelers once it had a monopoly on the airport. Unregulated capitalism that only considers pure supply and demand generates its own friction. (In this case in the form of resistance to true competition) I could probably make a pretty solid claim that every sort of economic model has similar levels of overall friction, and that one of the interesting ways of comparing systems would be to analyze where that friction would lay.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Time for Heathrow to overbook the slot pairs then, just in case some airlines don't really use them. Airlines ought to appreciate the treatment, considering how familiar they are with the process!