The European Fee claims EU guidelines don’t oblige air carriers to fly
EU authorities are urging airways to cease working empty flights as they’re economically inefficient and dangerous for the setting, saying that making empty or near-empty journeys is a business resolution for every service.
EU guidelines subsequently don’t oblige airways to fly or to maintain empty planes within the air. Quite the opposite, they enable the avoidance of empty flights, based on a senior spokesman for the European Fee, Stefan De Keersmaecker.
“Deciding to function routes or not is a business resolution by the airline firm and never a results of EU guidelines,” he wrote on Twitter.
The official cited information and forecasts from Eurocontrol, which reported that preliminary site visitors from 2022 was at 77% of pre-pandemic charges.
“Along with the decrease slot use charges, firms may request a ‘justified non-use exception’ – to not use a slot – if the route can’t be operated due to sanitary measures, e.g. when new variants emerge through the pandemic,” Keersmaecker added.
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European air service makes hundreds of ‘ghost’ flights
Final week, Europe’s second-biggest service Lufthansa confirmed that 18,000 flights had been flown empty as a result of intense regulatory strain and regardless of the financial and environmental penalties. Practically three,000 of these journeys had been operated by the service’s subsidiary, Brussels Airways.
Underneath the ‘use it or lose it’ rules, European airways are usually pressured to function flights in at the very least 80% of their scheduled takeoff and touchdown slots with a view to retain the suitable to make use of these slots.
The rule was suspended by the EU on the top of the coronavirus pandemic, however reintroduced on the degree of 50% final spring. Nonetheless, in December, the EC mentioned the present 50% threshold could be raised to 64% for this yr’s April-to-November summer time flight season.
Again then, the Belgian federal authorities referred the matter to the EC, urging it to rethink the foundations on securing slots.
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