British Airways has been accused of flying empty widebodies across the Atlantic in a bid to keep its landing slots at London airports. This seems a bit odd (and iah-phx doesn't buy it at all) that they would fly empty planes from London to Houston (and other cities) considering the huge amount of fuel that would be used on the flight (the British articles about this all talk about the CO2 emissions from an empty plane). For its part, BA says it has flown a handful of these so-called ghost flights because it needed to reposition crew (that doesn't really make much sense either) and that no crews were available to staff these flights. In short, I don't know what the hell is going on over there.
But what's interesting is how the British press is outraged from an environmental standpoint. While people in the US are still arguing about whether there's any global warming at all, Europe has woven the issue into how it looks at every aspect of business.
