Environmental Groups Unhappy With BMed's Wasted Emissions

If you want to know how precious landing slots are at London's Heathrow Airport, consider the following. Six nights a week, a British Mediterranean Airways (BMed) Airbus A320 departs Heathrow, bound for neighboring Cardiff. It then flies back to Heathrow, to repeat the process once again. Here's the punchline: no tickets are sold, and the 124 passenger seats remain empty on each leg.

The flights -- which cost the airline $5,000 in fuel for each leg, and nearly $600,000 each month for lease, maintenance, crew and insurance charges -- don't show up on any schedule, and the airline doesn't collect any revenue. And the flights continue... since BMed, which flies as a British Airways franchise, doesn't want to lose those precious slots at Heathrow.

The London Times reports if the slots go unused -- if BMed didn't fly its empty plane -- they could be reallocated to other carriers. And that's something BA, which controls 40 percent of the landing slots at Heathrow, is unwilling to do.

In addition to, perhaps, being an affront to common sense... environmentalists have attacked BMed for the so-called "ghost" flights. In the five months the airline has flown empty planes along the 140-mile route, the planes have kicked an amount of CO2 pollution equivalent to 36,000 automobiles into the air.

The Times reports each flight produces 5.21 tons of CO2. All but the most zealous environmental groups concede such a figure is acceptable, if the flight is full -- as the CO2 produced on a per-passenger basis is relatively low. It's a decidedly different animal if the seats are deliberately kept empty.

"It’s quite shocking," says Graham Thompson of the environmental advocacy group Plane Stupid. "These ghost flights very much undermine the greenwash we get from the airlines on how they are going to protect the environment. This shows that they are willing to sacrifice the climate for a profit."

It's worth noting again that BMed loses a substantial chunk of change each time the empty Airbus takes flight... but the airline considers it the price to pay for keeping its slots at Heathrow. All 1,250 time slots, with the exception of some late-night openings, are spoken for... and are guarded zealously.

BMed flies eight planes, to such noted vacation destinations as Tehran, Beirut, Armenia and Azerbaijan (the Times notes the airline is colloquially known as "BA with balls.") Originally, the carrier used the Cardiff slots to fly to Uzbekistan... but was forced to end that run in October, due to civil unrest.

"The Uzbek market had really collapsed, but we knew we would want to use those timings again this summer," BMEd CEO David Richardson explains. "It wasn’t the ideal thing to do, but we wanted to keep hold of it."

"It is possible to do it more cheaply than we have done -- in theory," Richardson continues. "Our difficulty was that with the timings we had we needed an airport that was open all night. We looked at the alternatives, including Manston, and Cardiff was the best option."

Richardson adds the airline could have used a smaller plane on the trip, but chose the A320 in the interest of keeping airport officials happy.

"You could use any type of plane, but the airport gets a little upset with you if you use a little Piper Warrior, say. We did not want to get on the wrong side of the airport on that, so we used the Airbus," he said.

Tony Juniper, vice-chairman of Friends of the Earth International, proposes BMed -- and other airlines that may chose to fly empty planes to retain landing slots -- should be fined, unless they agree to be charged an extra fee to offset the flight's carbon emissions.

"It's nuts. The government should take immediate steps to stop the practice," Juniper said. "Clearly if a plane is full it can claim to be energy efficient, but flying empty planes is madness."

Alas, it's a madness that may only get worse in the future... as Heathrow slots are bound to become even more precious if a proposed "Open Skies" deal between the US and European Union goes through. More airlines would be allowed into Heathrow under the proposal... driving the price for landing slots even higher.

FMI: www.flybmed.com, www.heathrowairport.com, www.planestupid.com