When the Covid pandemic hit 2020, one of the hardest-hit industries was aviation. Passengers stopped flying during the lockdown for fear of being either imprisoned in their homes or stuck abroad. But as the Guardian’s environmental editor, Damien Carringtontells Michael Safdie, Something strange was going on: Just because the planes had no passengers didn’t mean they didn’t fly. These flights with little or no passengers are known as ‘ghost flights’.
According to recently revealed official figures, around 15,000 ghost flights have departed from UK airports in March 2020 and September 2021. Flying is one of the most polluting and carbon-intensive activities people can do, and ghost flights have angered those campaigning for climate action. crisis. Carrington points out that some of these flights are the result of a long-established system that forces airlines to maintain flights in their airport ‘slots’ or risk losing their positions to rivals. But that doesn’t explain the flights in the pandemic period when the slot system was put on hold. So why do airlines continue to fly heavily polluting empty flights?
Photograph: Steve Parsons / PA
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