Simon Calder: It's time to put an end to the idiocy of 'ghost flights'

Luckily, no one was watching. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, California time, I found myself talking to a woman while sitting naked in a San Diego hotel room with a duvet over my head. Fortunately for her, she was 5,000 miles away. The only thing more ridiculous than this tableau was the subject we were discussing.

First, in case you work for the police or a tabloid newspaper, let me explain these unusual circumstances. A BBC radio programme had asked me to comment on a travel story. Now, even for radio contributions, I normally remain fully clothed. But the Pacific surf was pounding in, with breakers ridden only by moonbeams, and the sound of the ocean waves would have interfered with the radio waves had I not closed the window. So as I waited for the presenter to begin her interview, my vestments dwindled at the same rate as the temperature increased.

And the duvet? Well, the walls of the hotel room were as bare as I was, which made the sound uncomfortably reverberant. The simple way to deaden any acoustic is to don a duvet in the manner of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak.

If you think this account sounds implausible, wait until you find out what we were talking about: airlines willingly operating flights on which they know they will lose tens of thousands of pounds. As Oscar Wilde might have mumbled through the duvet, the only thing worse than dispatching an empty plane from Heathrow is not doing so.

The root of this nonsense is the "slot": the right to take off from, or land at, an airport at a specific time. Slot allocation is used at busy airports worldwide, from Hong Kong to Malaga to New York JFK. But the most precious permission in aviation is the entitlement to use one of the two runways at Heathrow airport.

Every viable slot at Britain's busiest airport was snapped up many years ago; the one per cent of available capacity is for unpopular arrivals late in the evening or departures on Saturday afternoons. Once an airline has begged, blagged or bought a slot, it can keep the entitlement for ever through so-called "grandfather rights". But this privilege applies on a strictly "use it or lose it" basis. If an airline fails to operate at the times it is entitled to, the slot can be reallocated to another carrier. This prospect is so alarming that airlines will go to desperate lengths to preserve what they regard as their birthright.

Last winter but one, British Mediterranean shuttled an Airbus 120 times between Heathrow and Cardiff rather than surrender a pair of slots. These were real "ghost flights", never advertised or announced, and carrying no passengers. A couple of years earlier, Qantas chartered a small commuter jet to shuttle between Heathrow and Manchester to preserve slots it wanted to use for new services to Australia. A handful of passengers were carried, but nothing like enough to justify the cost.

Reports this week suggested that BMI was planning "ghost flights" to sustain its entitlement of one in nine of Heathrow's slots. But my understanding is that all that BMI's deputy chief executive, Tim Bye, had said was that his airline will run loss-making scheduled services, carrying a handful of real passengers, rather than risk losing the slots. The short-term implications for some travellers are actually positive. The sorts of services that BMI would rationally cut in a time of rising costs are the midday domestic links from Heathrow to Durham Tees Valley, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester. Because BMI will keep operating the Airbuses, supply will remain constant and fares will be lower than usual.

But the cost in terms of both the airline's finances and the state of the planet will, of course, be substantial. Any system that makes it rational for airlines to operate near-empty planes is in serious need of repair. In the long term, slots should be sold to the highest bidder, allowing the market to decide the most efficient allocation of this scarce resource. In the short term, a slot amnesty should be declared, allowing airlines such as BMI to "park" its slots until the industry achieves some kind of equilibrium.

Will it happen? Probably not, because in the face of cold reality, the travel industry prefers to bury its collective head under a duvet.

Contact The Independent Traveller via email: travel@independent.co.uk

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