A SKY over Europe zipping with almost empty planes: it’s a haunting and distressing image. I can’t help thinking that when, in the future, people look back on the many ways we failed to grapple properly with the greenhouse gas emissions problem, these so-called empty “ghost flights” will be one of the phenomena we look at with disbelief.

But the aviation industry, of course, doesn’t get that yet. You only have to look at the latest controversy around so-called “ghost flights” in Europe to see the way that, for the sector, climate is just a ping-pong to bat around in the name of business survival and future profit.

Over the past few weeks there has been some controversy over how many of these flights there are and why they exist. The EU’s “use it or lose it” rule on flight slots means that airlines have to use their set take-off and landing times at least eight times out of 10, or forfeit them. This is not, by the way, an issue in the UK, where landing slot rules have been suspended since the start of the pandemic. But it is an issue that was kicked off in Europe recently when Lufthansa group complained that EU rules had forced it to operate 18,000 such ghost flights during the winter season.

Ryanair, with its usual publicity-prompting flair, reacted to their complaint with the suggestion that the airline group do as they do and simply sell their seats for cheaper. “The solution to Lufthansa’s ‘ghost flights’ problem is a simple one – just sell these seats to consumers,” said Ryanair’s chief executive Michael O’Leary. “Lufthansa loves crying crocodile tears about the environment when doing everything possible to protect its slots.”

It’s hard to see, amongst all the ghost flight statements of the past few weeks, anyone in the whole airline industry who seems to be taking the climate crisis seriously. Certainly, the director general of ACI Europe didn’t seem to be doing so when, defending the EU rules, he said: “Talk of ghost flights and of their environmental impacts, seems to hint at a doomsday scenario that has no place in reality. Let’s stick to the vital task of recovering and rebuilding together.”

The worst thing about empty flights or even half-empty flights, for us as consumers who might be bothered about our own pollution, is that the less full the flight, the bigger the impact of our own journey, the more emissions have been effectively spent getting us there.

The ghost flights story is also haunting because it draws attention to where we’re at more generally. I don’t believe that to save us from climate disaster we all need to stop flying permanently. But it seems to me we are in a moment when it would be good for those who are regular fliers to take a flights holiday, knowing that certainly in terms of short-haul the technology is coming in the form of zero-emissions electric and hydrogen flights. (Long-haul, unfortunately, does not yet have such prospects.) Of course, it’s not only ghost flights we may shake our head over in future years. Not exactly much better, though managing to sound superior, are cheap airlines, who offer flights for little more than a cup of coffee and a sandwich in order to fill their seats. Ryanair may be having a field day attacking Lufthansa, but some of its prices show how far the cost of flight is from representing its cost to the planet. These are flights so cheap they might as well be free, so cheap as to make all other forms of travel seem like a budgetary nonsense. A friend tells me her husband was looking at flights to Poland for £5. Online I find Ryanair offering flights to Spain from £4.99. A Which report, published last year showed, we have a system where the flights which belch around six times more emissions into the atmosphere, cost around fifty percent less than rail travel. Little effort has been made to change this.

Of course, none of this is particularly new. We know it already. The world of aviation has long offered us a prism through which we can see how much it’s the messed-up world of our systems, not just personal consumer choice, that is wrecking the planet.

But we can shift this. Ghost flights and cheap flights like these are another reminder of the need not just for removal of this EU red tape around flight slots, but for a significant carbon tax on aviation. That would be one way of getting serious about its emissions. Other countries are ahead of us on this. Denmark’s prime minister, for instance, announced, “This year we will decide on a new and ambitious tax on CO2. It must ensure that companies that pollute the climate pay for their emissions themselves…. This also applies to air traffic. To travel is to live, and that is why we fly. But at the same time it is harmful to our climate. Imagine if Denmark could help solve that problem. We need to make it green to fly.”