European Slot Flights Outrage Environmentalists

European environmental groups are howling in protest over reports that airlines will operate up to 100,000 empty flights in the next few months just to keep their slots at major airports. For much of the past two years, the European Commission had suspended the rule that airlines had to use at least 80 percent of their slot capacity to keep them. When travel restrictions eased, the commission set the limit at 50 percent and it’s due to rise to 64 percent in March. Thanks to the fallout from the Omicron wave, however, most carriers haven’t sold enough tickets to fill all the flights needed to make the slot quotas. 

Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr recently estimated his airline would have to fly 18,000 "extra, unnecessary" flights to keep those coveted slots while Brussels Airlines is estimating 3,000 so-called “ghost flights” will be in its schedule. Greenpeace has tallied them all up and come up with the 100,000 figure, estimating they will create 2.1 million tons of greenhouse gases. It called that “absurd and revolting.” Meanwhile, the group European Mobility For All called out the EU for creating the situation. “The EU Commission requiring airlines to fly empty planes to meet an arbitrary quota is not only polluting, but extremely hypocritical given their climate rhetoric,” the group said in a statement.