'Ghost' flights highlight current airline tax problems

For the last 6 months a British Mediterranean Airways plane has taken off from London's Heathrow Airport every day except Sunday and has flown the 140 miles to Cardiff and then returned the same day. The plane's departures have never been advertised on the departure boards and on each of those 124 seater flights not one single ticket has been sold and not one single passenger flew on any of them!



Why on earth would an airline spend an admitted £2million pounds on empty aircraft flying pointlessly between two cities every day of the week and, at a time when environmental issues are high on the agenda, deposit 5 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere on EVERY single flight?

The answer is because, although flights in the winter are not economic for British Med, it is vital to their summer trade that they retain their airline parking 'slots' at Heathrow Airport. Like most international airports Heathrow operates a 'use it or lose it' principle. In order to guarantee the preservation of those vital slots for their summer holiday schedule, British Med have to guarantee that at least one plane will take off every weekday all the year round. It is cheaper for British Med to waste £2 million on empty flights than to see the coveted Heathrow Airport slot go to a rival company, the consequence of which would be to lose a whole lot more in terms of coveted key holiday routes. The value of such slots is seen as between £10 and £20 million

This is nonsense. Not only is it a waste of money which is bound to be reflected in the cost of airfares, it is an almost criminal environmental scandal. There has to be a re think on the way airport slots are allocated to prevent this kind of thing. In Britain at least all the political parties are thinking up new forms of airline tax they can sell to the electorate which both encourage conservation and are not swingeingly prohibitive for the holiday traveller. No one has yet found the perfect balance and in fact the airlines are howling with horror at David Cameron's proposals to be enacted by any future Conservative government but if this ludicrous British Med airlines situation is an example of the sort of idiocy which prevails under the current framework, something needs to be done and done quickly!