"Ghost Flights"

[Luke SkyToddler]

Another shining piece of journalistic insight ... this time it's from our friends at the Daily Telegraph.

Thomas Cook to see 1,100 'ghost flights' to boost profit - Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/leisure/8657816/Thomas-Cook-to-see-1100-ghost-flights-to-boost-profit.html)

:ugh:

[Wolverhampton]

The author of this article can be contacted on a certain social media service if you wish to point out to her what positioning flights are. I have just done exactly that.

[lederhosen]

It does raise a fair point as to whether that many empty legs represent optimal planning. A thousand plus block hours is quite a substantial cost, saving even ten percent would make a worthwhile amount. Before someone tells us it is all unavoidable, and really adds to the bottom line I would say prove it.

The article certainly pulls no punches as far as Thomas Cook are concerned.
The leisure companies have been having a tough time for quite a while now. TUI has not exactly sparkled over the last years either.

Amazingly Frenzel the TUI boss who has overseen a less than sparkling performance, has just had his contract extended another two years until he is 67.

[OltonPete]

One happened last night at BHX and it was relating to the BHX-LPA.

This is a regular TCX Saturday evening departure from BHX to LPA
arriving back to BHX in the early hours of Sunday.

However last Saturday the aircraft arrived from Turkey on Saturday
afternoon and positioned empty to Glasgow (757). It then operated
GLA-LPA and back into BHX.

Then the usual BHX-LPA operated last night, then the aircraft retuned to GLA from LPA (I assume with last weeks GLA outbound pax) and then empty back to BHX at 6am ready for the early Sunday departures.

Thomas Cook have done this for years but from memory Thomson have not.

I am amazed that after factoring the fuel costs on the empty legs that
money can be made but I assume the bean-counters have sanctioned it.

Pre school holidays can be lean times at BHX but usually the last two
weeks in June and not mid July. Was the Scottish school holidays later
this year as I seem to remember this kind of thing happened earlier than
mid July?

[crewmeal]

I thought a ghost flight was an empty scheduled flight from A to B to keep the slot people happy otherwise if they failed to operate the flight then they would lose the slot.

[caaardiff]

GLA summer holidays is quite a money maker for TCX, certain school holidays see several more flights a day using aircraft from other bases. Nicknamed by some the Glaaj!
I doubt TCX would operate these flights if it wasn't worth their while. Demand goes through the roof and TCX are a big name in Scotland.
The operating crew are normally from the base where the aircraft comes from and operate just as described above.

[mathers_wales_uk]

'Ghost Flights' are in my understanding the same as crewmeal sugests.

There was an article in the papers just before the bmi and bmed merger of ghost flights being operated by bmed from Cardiff-Heathrow and back daily in order to meet the target set by Heathrow for operating slots.

What is being described here is positioning legs of flights to get the aircraft from where it is to where it's needed. Obviously Thomas Cook sends their aircraft around the UK to meet demand. I'm sure that some of these sectors maybe utilised better by operating on a 'W' pattern to increase demand.

[Tyke]

The Sunday Times picked this story up and gave TCX a hammering. Compared their record to that of Thomson/TUI (unfavourably). Didn't the ST belong to the same owner as Thomson many years ago? Or is that too much of a conspiracy theory?

[StevieW]

Thomas Cook have been doing this for years. It's even more apparent in October, when you get almost every aircraft in the Thomas Cook fleet operating out of Glasgow for one weekend and back into it the next. I think they had 13 flights from Glasgow to Tenerife on the Friday of that weekend last October, including a couple of 767s.

The situation is slightly better this summer, as they have more W-flights, which can easily be routed to Glasgow for 4-5 weeks during the Scottish peak. So instead of operating LGW-DLM-BOH-DLM-LGW, they simply operate LGW-DLM-GLA-DLM-LGW. The Gatwick based crew that operated the LGW-DLM-GLA sector would overnight in GLA on the Friday and operate GLA-AYT-LGW of a similar rotation on the Saturday. So only two sets of crew need to be transported between the bases.

As has been said, they've been shifting aircraft around like this for years. If the bean counters didn't approve it would have been stopped a long time ago.

[jabird]

Sounds like a non-story to me. Or they could operate double pick-ups or double-drops - both inefficient, even if they don't involve 'empty' aircraft.

I'd trust the beancounters to work out whatever works best - and they can easily factor in the carbon cost, poor on TC if they didn't.

Of course, BA's ANU-SKB in a B777 is just 60 miles, pax usually in double figures - but Torygraph readers use that service (and there seem to be good operational reasons here too).

[NYCSavage]

To help you would think they would offer seats for the ghost flight to the public at a nominal fee and explain no bells and whistles etc

[flyinthesky]

NYCsavage

then you would need cabin crew, ticketing, check-in etc. And all the pax would need to pay APD. A positioning flight needs none of these.

I know it sounds simple but turning a non-revenue flight into a revenue service is more complicated than it sounds.

[befree]

The sooner APD is changed to a proper emissions tax for each sector (empty or full) the better. Flying empty planes round is madness. You tax the plane for flying a sector and then ther operator is going to be keen on filling every seat.

[Skipness One Echo]

Flying empty planes round is madness.
It's an operational necessity, get real, they don't do it for sh*t and giggles, they do it to make sure ma, pa and the kids have a nice holiday.

Specifically, Glasgow has a traditional holiday called the "Glasgow Fair" which used to see extra Air 2000 and Britannia aircraft join the based units at GLA over a short period, indeed when Virgin launched service to GLA this was exactly the regime that was introduced.
If you want to serve that massive spike in the market, then you factor that price into the positioning flights or allow the other guy to fly those customers. In the trading cycle, we see years of UK based positioners and other years of the likes of <insert foreign carrier> and their ilk flying empty in from abroadland at the start and out empty at the end of the seasonal spike.

Two broad options :
1) Make the travellers take the bus / train to MAN to join the greater volume and freq there
2) See above !!!

The first one leaves the family knackered and frequently a tiring and grumpy end to a good holiday.

[clareview]

We need to distinguish between ghost flights and positioning flights.

A positioning flight is when a plane is needed somewhere else from where it currently is. The best example is probably with an airline like Titan which steps in when other airlines have problems. So, for example, lets say a companies aircraft develops a fault at Manchester and that company asks Titan to help. Titan has to position its plane from its Stansted base to Manchester in order to fulfill this commitment. No doubt positioning costs are factored in to the quote for the work. Similarly if a base only needs a plane for part of the week based on demand, the airline has 2 choices - leave it sitting for the rest of the week costing money or move it for a number of days to somewhere where it can carry passengers and make some money. A further example is BA positioning a plane from Heathrow to its maintenance base at Cardiff.

Ghost flights are when an airline operates flights simply to meet an agreement to keep a route going or when it is in danger of loosing a slot due to not currently using it, The bmi example to Cardiff is fairly well known but BA did it in the past both with its own planes and, I recall, with a B1900 and perhaps an ATR belonging to a German company called Avanti. Both examples were to secure ownership of slots until they were needed for proper services.

[jabird]

Are ghost flights just a UK problem though? The practice seems to originate from the 'parliamentary trains' which operate just because it is cheaper to serve a station once each week than to go through the legal motions of closing down a station.

At MME you even have a ghost airport station if you want to call it that!

I think there should be another category for totally under-used services - I have heard of PSO equivalent routes in the US with average loads of 1 each way. I suppose single digit pax loads on a 737 or larger aren#t that uncommon if they are full in the other direction?

[clareview]

I recall many years ago when BA operated the proper shuttle and then super shuttle services from LHR to Man, BFS, Edinburgh and Glasgow, the guarantee was turn up and fly - no advance booking required, The BA TV advert talked about 2 pilots, 5 cabin crew and one very important passenger (on a B757).

I flew several times on the back up plane (sometimes a B737 or BAC1-11 but often a B757) with fewer than 20 passengers.

I know there are PSO type routes in the US and Canada but in Ireland I have flown Derry to Dublin in an ATR 42 with 5 passengers (and only 2 got off the inbound at Derry) and Carrickfinn to Dublin, also in an ATR 42 with 12 passengers

[jabird]

I flew as part of a group of 8 once MAN-IST on TK. Apart from us, there were 3 other pax.

I always used that as the argument for why private carriers were more efficient - but to their credit, TK have now added BHX-IST, and are one of the world's fastest growing carriers (I'll ignore the stupid football player ads though).

Winair puddlejumpers are regular single passenger taxis, but only 19 seats to fill on a good day anyway! Always amused how busy SXM to SAB gets on Wednesdays because everyone goes over to renew their car tax there for a fraction of the cost of what they pay on SXM! I guess in a way, that's a reverse PSO!