Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest

news on travelling, whether you're just dreaming of a great escape, looking forward to one or actually

away and having the time of your life. Today, I want to talk about so-called ghost flights,

what they are, why they exist, and what's going to happen to them.

Now, it's always been the case that some airlines have flown some flights empty,

some of the time, for perfectly good logical reasons.

For example, maintenance might be carried out hundreds, thousands of miles away from the

airport's main base, so it gets taken out there and brought back empty of passengers. Sometimes

he might have the situation where a plane's been chartered and it's only a one-way load and

therefore the plane goes out full and then comes back empty.

But there are this winter in Europe many thousands of flights that are just deliberately being

flown around empty. And look, I suggest that you don't automatically blame the airline, blame

the system. Here's what's happening. So the slot, permission to land or take off at a constrained

airport like London Heathrow, Amsterdam, Skippole, Paris, Charles de Gaulle or Frankfurt is a very,

very valuable resource. Airlines have them historically. If you, in 1960, had a slot to leave

Heathrow at 9 o'clock in the morning and return at 5 o'clock in the evening, and you've managed to

carry on flying that. It's's yours add in for an item

incredibly valuable the more that airlines airports have become more popular more flying and goes on

the more valuable these slots are sometimes they can change hands for millions of pounds

therefore airlines don't want to lose them. However, rather than just allowing them to hoard a slot, the European Union, the British government,

will say, okay, you've got to use this slot a certain amount of time.

The usual rule is 80% of the time, so you either fly four out of five of the flights at that

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