Every morning at 5:35 am, Qatar Airways flight QR988—a standard 354-seater Boeing
777—takes off from Melbourne, Australia and flies 399 miles—or 642 kilometers—to the city
of Adelaide. And every single morning, this flight is almost entirely empty. If you’ve
been on any flight in the last few years, you’ll know that airlines are doing everything that they
can to cram their planes to capacity, so why exactly is Qatar Airways bothering to
fly a single-digit number of passengers between two Australian cities? Well settle in, because
this is gonna be a long four and a half minutes. To understand this flight, there are a few basic
things you need to understand first—one: this is an airplane. Two: airplanes are sometimes owned by
airlines. Three: an airline is only worth as much as the routes it can fly, and besides the obvious
things it needs to fly those routes—like enough planes and enough crew and enough
little bags for throwing up into—it also needs permission to fly each one of those routes. But
how do they get permission? Well, that’s where this starts to get a little more complicated.
Once an airline decides that they want to fly a route, either because it makes economic sense
or because the disgraced chairman of the Port Authority of New Jersey needed a faster way to
get to his polo-themed vacation home, they need to negotiate for space at the airports that the
route would fly between; at less-trafficked level one and level two airports, this can be a simple
formality, but with busier level three airports, an airline will need to shell out millions of
dollars for a time slot, usually by buying it from another airline. If an airline isn’t using
a particular slot often enough, they can have it taken away and given to another airline,
so it sometimes makes sense to fly empty or near-empty planes just to keep the legal rights
to a route—when you hear about ghost flights, this is almost always why. So, yeah, Qatar is probably
doing something like that, case closed, now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go spend some private
time with my YouTube Play Buttons. Sorry, what was that? This situation is way more complicated
and Qatar Airways has actually invented an entirely new kind of ghost flight? Well, fine,
I guess we have to talk about the second kind of institution that airlines need to negotiate
their routes with, and that’s the government. You see, before a country can send a plane
full of people to another country and not cause a war to happen, those two countries first have to
sign something called a “bilateral air agreement,” which says how many planes and how many passengers
one country is allowed to send to another. The US and Europe, for example, operate under something
called an “Open Skies Agreement,” where any American or European airline is allowed to fly
as many routes with as many passengers between the two places as they want. But we all know how much
Americans and Europeans love each other, so it can look different for two less-friendly countries,
like, say, Australia and Qatar. Australia’s agreement with Qatar is anything but open skies;
Qatar is only allowed to fly 28 flights a week to Australia’s major airports—Melbourne, Brisbane,
Sydney, and Perth—with a carve-out that allows them to fly additional routes to Australia’s
smaller airports. Now, Qatar isn’t too happy about this; those 28 flights to major airports
are always overbooked, and the flights to regional airports aren’t gonna help much because—let’s face
it—outside of Australia’s four major cities, the rest of the country is pretty much just sand,
and Qatar already has sand at home. So, every once and a while, Qatar says, “hey,
can we pretty please have more flights?” and Australia says, “absolutely not,
we need those flights for our precious baby Qantas Airways, and also a few years ago you made a bunch
of passengers get naked at gunpoint, and we only want you to be able to do that 28 times a week
max.” So that means that if Qatar was going to fly more planes to Australia’s biggest airports,
they were gonna have to get clever about it. And get clever about it, they did.
In November of 2022, Qatar Airways registered this 354-seater flight from Doha to
Adelaide—Australia’s fifth largest airport, which, if you do the math, is out of the top four. That
meant that they could fly this route every single day without using up any of their major airport
slots, because they weren’t technically flying to a major airport. All seems above board so far,
no shenanigans detected. But here’s the twist: this flight has nothing to do with Adelaide;
most of the people on board probably don’t even know what Adelaide is, and almost
none of them will ever set foot there. If you actually wanted to fly from Doha to Adelaide,
you’d almost never take this flight—you would probably take something like this, which also
leaves every day, but is generally cheaper and is about 9 episodes of Cutthroat Kitchen shorter than
the first flight. So what’s the point of the first flight? Well, the first flight has a layover in
Melbourne—an airport in Australia’s top four, even though this technically is a flight to Adelaide.
But when QR988 touches down in Melbourne at 11:30 pm, almost every single passenger disembarks,
leaves the airport, and heads straight to whatever thing it is that Melbourne is known for, which I
frankly can’t seem to figure out by googling it. From this point forward, no one new can board the
plane; there might be plenty of Australians who would happily buy a ticket on this second leg from
Melbourne to Adelaide, but they can’t—Australia's aviation laws prevent Qatar from selling tickets
to any domestic passengers, so the only people allowed to take this flight are the people in
Doha who thought, “you know what, I’d like to go to Adelaide, Australia, but I don’t want to go
right to Adelaide… I’d like to spend six hours in a Melbourne airport terminal halfway through the
flight, and yes, I will pay extra for that.” So now we’re in a situation where, six hours
after landing in Melbourne, this plane takes off for Adelaide with a single-digit number of very
eccentric passengers on board—sometimes literally no one—before the flight turns back around and
flies, empty again, back to Melbourne to pick up passengers for Doha. So, everyone wins: Qatar gets
their extra flights to Melbourne, Australia is off the hook if Qantas goes bankrupt, and we’re
all 20 metric tons of carbon per day closer to all being cooked alive on our own hell-planet.
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