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

I'm taking bets

[Opportunist]

Want to bet that we'll see this pop up in some chemtrail conspiracy video within a day?

Re:I'm taking bets

[magarity]

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.

Re:I'm taking bets

[pr0fessor]

His mind snapped from the constant attempts at control by advertisers.

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:I'm taking bets

[Applehu Akbar]

The problem with the chemtrail apparatus is not just the tanks, which require lightening the passenger load but the dispenser heads attached to each engine. In-flight turbulence causes the feed to become uneven. That's why in the bad-weather Midwest you get towns that totally swallow the Illuminati conspiracy to the extent that they have Knights Templars parades down Main Street, while the next town over will totally reject the conspiracy.

Re:I'm taking bets

[iCEBaLM]

Sounds like that guy opened his mind so wide that his brain fell out.

Re:I'm taking bets

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how well-known this is, but from 2005-2008 the valves in the chemtrail dispersal equipment used by about two thirds of the airlines, was cheap shit made by some Chinese company. (This stuff isn't FAA-approved because that would require disclosing its existence, but on the upside that means there are many more bidders and it was really quite competitive. Even the "juice" was cheap as long as you weren't too much of a Nazi about consistency.) The valves would jam often, or spill way-too-high concentrations. They were such shitty valves. The short-term fix was always the same: you just cram two pieces of metal into there so that it's left slightly open. It would leak the mind-control chemicals continuously, but that was better than a full-on spill and during the flight it would still get distributed fairly close to correctly.

Anyway in the summer of 2007 I did the usual hack to keep the valve slightly open, and as I'm sure plenty of other people experienced, the inner piece punctured into the line.

Now, as you know, the juice isn't terribly effective on mere skin contact; I get this shit all over my fingers all the time and only suffer some slight delusions, which I always snap out of. Just the other day, for example, I got some on my boot and pantleg, and I believed the president was an obsequious puppy, wagging his tail whenever he heard Putin's voice or saw that Putin was looking him in the eye. But then the next day I was fine, and realized the president is a stable genius.

But that time I punctured the line, it started really quite a leak, and my maintenance cart that I had parked next to the plane had been sitting in the sun and was very hot, and the stream dribbled onto it. There was this cloud that looked like smoke and the next thing you know OH FUCK, I AM BREATHING THIS SHIT JUST LIKE THE PLEBES!

Ever since then, I've no longer been sure that 9/11 was an inside job. It just seems so unreasonable and unbelievable that all the world's architects, structural engineers and firemen all just happened to get coerced at the same time, into a conspiracy to agree with the official story for how the towers fell. I can't figure out how so many tens of thousands of people maintain a secret without anyone speaking out. I know that I used to know how it they pulled it off, but now .. I simply can't remember! I've lost it. Possibly forever. It's been like 11 years now. I used to know the truth but there's just this .. fog.

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.

FUBAR

[Thud457]

Please explain to me again how Capitalism organizes the economy for the most efficient use of resources.




HA! Trick question. All isms suck.

Re:FUBAR

[fahrbot-bot]

Please explain to me again how Capitalism organizes the economy for the most efficient use of resources.

Because lower-case letters actually cost more.

Re:FUBAR

[Locke2005]

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.

Re:FUBAR

[AlanBDee]

who said anything about efficiency

Um, you did.

Please explain to me again how Capitalism organizes the economy for the most efficient use of resources

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:Answer

[110010001000]

The editors added that after I made my comment.

But your car is destroying the environment

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing that the carbon footprint of unnecessary jet fuel expenditures isn't even brought into question.

Re: Answer

[110010001000]

Or build more runways.

Re:Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ridiculous that Slashdot allows summary edits but still not post edits.

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.

Landing fees?

[rnturn]

Make them outrageously high. But discount the actual landing fee by dividing it--or somehow scale it down--by the number of "souls" on-board. Eventually some bean counter will wonder if it's actually worth it to be hanging on to those slots that are not being used by actual fare-paying passengers. Perhaps the airports could do the same with jet fuel and make fuel cost more when it's used to fly an empty aircraft. It's seems to me to be the height of stupidity to burn up fuel--fuel that the airlines are constantly complaining is too expensive--to fly empty planes.

Re:Landing fees?

[istartedi]

Take-off fees, yes; but not landing fees. We don't want pilots pressured into choosing a riskier landing due to fees. I'm picturing a scenario where they don't want to divert from bad weather because their alternative field has a high landing fee and management is breathing down their necks about it whenever they land there.

A Capitol idea, comrade!

[TiggertheMad]

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.

Re:Answer

[irving47]

Who-knows-how-much jet fuel being wasted, adding to the price of tickets... CO2 being generated... And I'm getting bitched at for wanting a fucking straw.

Unused slot pairs? Obvious solution -- overbook!

[Liket]

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!