AFAIK this is common practice in many armies, where each group obtains a predetermined amount ('dotation') of goods (gas, ammo, clothes...) for a given period (often a year), uses whatever it needs, then an accounting process takes into account whatever wasn't used in order to calculate the next dotation.<p>It seems consistent and efficient.<p>However it neglects human nature.<p>The soldiers want to avoid missing anything, they simply refuse to see their dotation reduced, therefore just before the end of the period they discreetly use (without any other reason) or destroy all unused goods.<p>Centralization and bureaucracy excel at breaking human will and things altogether.
Is "thousands" of gallons even <i>remotely</i> accurate?<p>The numbers I can find are that a 747 uses 1 gal/second, so a <i>single</i> excess 5-hour flight is like 18,000 gallons. Even a ~45% efficiency reduction on that for more modern planes gives 10,000 gallons per excess flight. Multiply that by however many excess flights per airline per day and then by many airlines are doing this (I dunno, let's say 5 flights for 5 airlines? though this feels generous) and suddenly you have like 250,000 gallons/day being wasted <i>per day</i>. Multiplied by however many days they're doing this (idk, 10? though that also sounds generous) that's already like <i>2.5 million gallons every couple of weeks</i>.<p>Did they mean "millions"?
Somewhat related:<p>My father was a Navy pilot during the Cold War. He told me fuel budgets were based on the last period’s consumption. If their actual use was below what was considered their predicted amount, they would put planes on a schedule where they would take off fully loaded, fly to 30k (or whatever made sense) and dump all of their fuel into the atmosphere.<p>They would then land, empty, and repeat the process.<p>That was a shitload of avgas dropped into the atmosphere but hey, military bureaucracy...
The oddity I've personally had, is I had been planning a summer trip to Germany for the Euro 2020 tournament (assuming they don't get cancelled.) However, I hadn't bought plane tickets yet. Due to the virus, I figured I might get cheaper rates. The opposite has been true. The round trip went from ~$1200 up to ~$1800 in just a month or two. I'm still tracking flights, but so far I haven't seen a good dip in pricing. I don't know if airline pricing isn't reacting to supply/demand, or if there hasn't been that big of a dip in US to Europe passenger traffic.
I feel like there's a short-term solution to this:<p>You can keep your slot and not fly the plane, as long as you pay some large percentage* of the cost of each ghost trip to the organisation that'd resell your slot. Your 'flight' must be fully crewed.<p>That way the carbon isn't emitted, (some) jobs are kept secure, and the airline recoups a little of the money they would have otherwise lost.
Is this article being slightly over-dramatic? I would've thought most of these planes carry a significant amount of cargo, which likely has increased since there are fewer passengers and more room, and there might also be more remote/online purchasing as of recent.<p>Or is that not really a factor here?
The other thing to note is that an oil price crash is going on. It had started before the outbreak, was accelerated because of it, and accelerated further by the OPEC+ talks failing yesterday.<p>Cheaper aviation fuel will incentivize airlines to keep their planes in the sky.
Busses run empty at odd hours, because its necessary to have a regular schedule to keep customers? Not so crazy...its a fact of scheduled transportation.
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.
Airlines almost never make profits, because their revenue and main cost are strongly pro-cyclical:<p><pre><code> In the booms, they fly full, but with high fuel prices.
In the recessions, they fly empty, but fuel is cheap.
</code></pre>
Covid-19 has devastated travel, but also dropped the oil price - still no profits.
Does anyone have any reliable information on the risks of flying right now? I took a couple flights this week, seemed to be status quo. People of all ages flying with no one practicing any special hygiene measures.
It seems like this could be fixed with a bit of economics?<p>One idea would be to have airlines pay reservation fees for unused slots, where the cost is slightly lower than flying planes in that slot.<p>I also wonder how the waste compares with Bitcoin?
As a halfway answer to this, I ask if specific plane types are required on these routes. If not then swap out current craft for smaller vehicles so that your pilots can maintain proficiency time while still moving cargo and the reduced number of passengers. Flying isn’t like riding a bike and pilots can’t sit in simulators ground-side indefinitely. You won’t be swapping in a Dash 8 for an A380 in every case but smaller Embraer jets in lieu of the Airbus heavies could help keep the training/proficiency side going.
They could solve this easily by having the airports “freeze” the current quotas till things achieve some equilibrium... else this is unnecessarily wasteful.
Who gives a fuck about some wasted gas? If the economic freeze lasts long enough, the service sector gets decimated.<p>People will be laid off and the secondary effects of this virus will be almost as bad as the life toll.
Tangential question: is there a significant reduction in flights over the US? Is it my imagination or are we having more blue skies like the days after 9/11?
<i>Under Europe's rules, airlines operating out of the continent must continue to run 80% of their allocated slots or risk losing them to a competitor.</i><p>Risk losing their slots to a competitor? No airline is making money right now and none can afford to take over new slots to operate more flights. Your slots are completely safe - there are no buyers.
If planes are really empty, why can they not just pay the airport fees since I believe that is all the airports care about.<p>Or, perhaps take off, and separately land, a smaller plane such as a Cessna.
Why empty? Why not let actual people travel for free/cheap? I believe there is enough people who don't care about the virus but don't have spare money to travel far away.
Covid 19 is a good opportunity for extremely sensible change. Lets all stop needlessly flying, lets all work from home (if your just doing an office job anyway), lets use local products and not stuff from half way across the world.
So just because of some greedy business contracts the most fuel-inefficient mode of transport is running all the less efficiently. Think about it next time the airline shows you an offer to "Fly green" or "offset your carbon footprint".
"asking for the rules to be suspended during the outbreak to prevent further environmental and economic damage"<p>It's not like having those planes full of people results in less environmental damage.
I’ve been waiting for airlines to give up on scheduling altogether and move to JIT routing. Maintaining schedules seems fragile, and I think demand would increase dramatically if customers didn’t have to plan ahead. This will definitely happen when the industry gets disrupted by cheap autonomous and electric mini-planes, but it seems that schedules are so broken already that the biggest thing keeping up the facade are FAA rules (e.g. massively unnecessary runway intervals).