At this point of the climate crisis, there’s no excuse for ‘ghost flights’

If I were to tell you that, over the next couple of months, one single airline group is gearing up to operate 18,000 completely empty flights, you might have questions. Questions like: What the actual f***? And yet that’s exactly what Lufthansa Group – which owns airlines including Lufthansa, Brussels Airlines, Swiss International Airlines and Austrian Airlines – announced it was doing. Other major flag carriers all over Europe will be running similar schedules of passenger-less planes – a phenomenon known as “ghost flights” . It’s an expensive business, getting an aircraft airborne – and the only thing that makes it financially worthwhile is a high load-factor of fully paid-up travellers.