[osrec]

But would it be enough to make airlines relinquish lucrative slots?

I personally feel the problem is more related to a bogus slot allocation/deallocation policy that forces an airline to fly an empty plane around to hold a slot. Could they not just remove that rather pointless requirement, and have some sort of market based approach to auction slots for a set period (say 1 year at a time)?!

[sofixa]

> Could they not just remove that rather pointless requirement, and have some sort of market based approach to auction slots for a set period (say 1 year at a time)?!

The whole point of the current system is to combat old carriers that had local monopolies and refused to allow competition ( e.g. British Airways at Heathrow). Such a carrier could afford to spend money to prevent competitors from flying from their hubs, making themselves the only ( and thus more expensive) option.

The regulation is good, it just needs more fine tuning ( e.g. they should add a minimal passenger and/or cargo load, to make sure the flights aren't there just to keep the slots and are actually used).

[osrec]

Understood. Yeah, I imagine they need to fine tune things to account for pandemics and other extenuating circumstances.

I guess during the last pandemic of this scale, there wasn't really much of an aviation industry.

[sofixa]

They already did, the slot needs to "only" be used at 50% (it was 80-90% before), but obviously that isn't enough ( which couldn't have been easily predicted though, the pandemic is constantly evolving).