toomanybooks

Say hi to Glenn for me.

C W

I agree that airlines account for all pax in these decisions. Yet their analysts are easily smart enough to figure out what fares each pax is paying and evaluate the routes based on that. They're not just looking at cumulative pax counts or cumulative revenue. Yes, there might be a very small effect from the tiny additional revenues from mileage runners. I doubt it is enough to ever sustain a route or influence aircraft choice, the CPM is just too low and the fares don't exist for long enough.

If everybody on the plane paid the same fare, I'd agree with you about dividing the emissions equally. In fact, if everybody on the plane at least paid their CASM it'd be a reasonable argument. But mileage run fares are so dramatically below CASM, not even including all other costs, that they are fundamentally little different economically from non-rev travel. I've done 13,000 mile runs where the amount going to the airline after taxes and airport fees was $150, absolutely negligible. Do you think that an airline employee traveling on a standby, space-available basis should share equally in the emissions culpability?

Your sustainment of routes argument to service high-value clients is interesting, but I think it's backwards. High value clients are high value because they fly expensive routes on expensive fares. If they regularly flew loss-making routes to the point of sustaining those routes they wouldn't be HVCs. Airlines don't track HVCs by elite tier, they have internal metrics related to actual profitability per mile flown. This is why extremely high per-mile spenders can get DL 360, AA CK, BA Premier etc without even flying enough miles for top-tier earned status. However, there is truth that airlines must operate some flights that have less natural demand than they would prefer, for example to sustain presence in a particular market. Part of the beauty of mileage runs is that they can fill unsold inventory on such routes, which are flying anyway.

toomanybooks

Tell you what, why don’t you go shame Leonardo DiCaprio who recently flew his EYEBROW ARTIST round-trip across the Atlantic in a private plane to work on him?

Or, God forbid, Al Gore, who must produce 100x or more the carbon dioxide I do.

FCIan

Haha, no. I've actually only flown business class once, courtesy of QR on a work trip.

C W

Thinking about this a little more, I understand why you're so resistant to the argument of the plane flying anyway. It's a commonly used cop-out for a variety of issues. For example, vegetarianism. People often have justifications like, "even if I stopped eating meat, I couldn't possibly have an effect on the global meat demand." Which is largely fallacious, even though their impact certainly wouldn't close a slaughterhouse, it could slightly impact their grocery store's ordering and sourcing.

Yet the fundamental difference with air travel is that while demand for air travel is appropriately approximated by a continuous linear function, supply is not. Air travel supply is naturally quantized because airplanes typically fly hundreds of people at once. Air travel supply is not capable of existing at any discreet level as it is impossible to add a single passenger of capacity, but rather only levels which are the combination of all planes flying all routes, further with the addition of each plane or route having substantial barriers to entry. Therefore a unit increase in demand does not generate a proportional linear increase in supply, rather to increase supply the demand increase must be sufficient to move the non-continuous quantum equation of supply to its next appropriate level, which requires adding a flight or frequency or changing the plane operating a route.

Being a travel consultant yourself, I'm sure you are very familiar with airline faring systems and fare classes. And you know very well that low-fare class inventory is limited by revenue management. I find it implausible that tickets:

1. sold on an inventory limited basis
2. sold on an irregular and occasional basis
3. and which are filling unsold space at a price lower than the cost of providing that space

can possibly move airline supply to a higher quantized level through upgaging, frequency increases, or route creation.

intuition

I now realise you will not to go into details about the way to calculate the footprint (earlier refereed by you as "the facts"), which make it a bit difficult to move on to the ethics part of your question.

But what you are saying here seems to be that the factual individual footprint is of less importance. You have presented a metric that says flying is bad from a carbon dioxide point of view, and that is all we need.
In this perspective the Defra calculation works well. It indeed does not take into account the impact of individual choices - My "individual" footprint is the same regardless if I fly an old gas-guzzler or a modern, fuel efficient plane. We all share the same average footprint and thus all choice to fly are equally bad. In this model, renewing the fleet with fuel efficient engines and high density cabins has zero impact on the environment.


Dr Jardine of Oxford university wrote this piece in 2009 with details on how to calculate the factual emissions per individual passenger. The paper also benchmarks different methods, making the flaws of the Defra model clear. It is over all very interesting reading.
But my main take away is in his conclusions, especially the second paragraph:

FCIan

@intuition I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ignore your question. I just don't have the answers. I think any calculator will use a number of assumptions and should be taken as a guide, not a rule. I find them as useful and worthy tools for indicating our own usage. Personally, I use a green energy tariff, am a car club member and don't own a vehicle, eat meat just a few times a week and fly around 3-5 return flights a year. It calculated my output as 7 tons per annum and in layman's terms that is useful for me to know, to help guide my behaviour.

I know that's not as scientific as much of the (very interesting) data that FTers have raised in this thread but I love the simplicity of it and am willing to have a wider margin of error to make the subject less baffling to understand and thus, have broader appeal. I will look over this data next week. Thanks for bringing these points to my attention.

FCIan

Very interesting thoughts. So what about with Istanbul or Dublin routing for BA customers? These are the two most common miles run routing for BA Exec members. This is because the Irish tax system adds an extra financial incentive for low miles fares and Istanbul is low because of Turkish Airlines aggressively low pricing, which has a knock on market effect. There must be dozens, if not hundreds of miles runs on the DUB-LHR & IST-LHR route per week. Is that more of a collective effect that can have a quantifiable impact on supply and demand? There are regular patterns of behaviour within the mileage run collective which would have market forces.

wxman22

The problem with assumptions is that they often lead to incorrect conclusions.

To wit, you assume that whatever increase is being caused by that "extra" passenger doing a MR is a net increase.

Most Americans have cars and in any given day spend some time in those cars.

You seem to assume that the MRer will sit at home in a dark, cold room and not use any energy at all.

It's far more likely they will drive someplace. Therefore a far stronger case can be made that a MR is a much more efficient use of resources.

If you are trying to write about the carbon footprint of anything, I suggest you learn some science first and not get your "facts" from the internet.

Madone59

+1

@FCIan Have you reached out to GE about their use of a shadow jet??

FCIan

I think I've answered this one before but just to reiterate: It is no defence at all to say 'there's someone else out there that's worse'. I mean how would you get on in court if you were defending yourself on assault charges by saying 'at least I didn't commit a murder'.

Also, you cannot compare your personal CO2 emissions to that of corporations. It's apples and oranges, you can't just say 'they are both fruit so the same'.

Leo Dicaprio might say 'I use my significant public profile to raise awareness of environmental issues to counter-balance my personal output' and 'I am too well know to travel on public transport safely'. I don't know and I'm not responsible for defending him. You are changing the subject. We are not here talking about that subject, we are thinking about miles runs.

Madone59

What part of my question was a defense? I've said this several times but just to reiterate: You are in the middle of a forest fire yelling at the pine cones!

Now. Regardless of what "someone else is doing worse" GE is literally flying a second jet behind the CEO's jet just in case they need it. So question stands: Are you working to put out the forest fire, or are you just going to keep scolding the pine cones?

I am not comparing my personal CO2 to a corporation. I was pointing out [other] frivolous Aviation CO2 emissions

mapleg

--------
Milage Run Ethics (sic)

My first thoughts are that as a journalist you should spell "mileage" and "practice" correctly.

Fabo.sk

There must be. Surely, there must, otherwise your argument is false.

Well, just as well: The same way your understanding of airlines taking mileage runners into account when evaluating their routes (the effect is clearly negligible, and even if it wasn't, the airlines would find soon enough that they have too much capacity if they were only able to sell a significant number of tickets on MR pricing) is wrong, your understanding of number of mileage runners is wrong.

There is simply not enough mileage runners to make that many mileage runs...
unless you count the "well I want to fly to the medditeranean, might as well fly to Istanbul on BA instead of Athens on U2" types, which is, again, breaking your argument (that MRs have no other benefit and no flights would happen if it wasn't for MRs)

Lack

I'd say it's the British tax system along with BA marketing dominance penalizing the environment by making the most efficient means of travel the most expensive one.