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. Anyway, if you want to stay organized while
wandering around Melbourne International Airport for six hours, you might be interested in our
sponsor, Bellroy. Bellroy is my new go-to for clean, design-focused and super utilitarian
accessories—they made a name for themselves by redesigning wallets from the ground up,
creating these sleek, intuitive designs that are built to last, but they’ve since
expanded to bags, slings, totes, phone cases, and travel pouches that all follow the same
design philosophies. I just ordered a tech kit from them to take with me when I travel—it’s
smart, durable, looks amazing, holds every stupid wire I need to take with me everywhere, and
best of all, it’s great for the environment. From recycled nylon to eco-tanned leather, Bellroy
takes the environmental impacts of all of their materials more seriously than any other accessory
manufacturer I’ve ever encountered, even going as far as to develop their own sustainable materials
when others wouldn’t cut it. If you want to see what Bellroy has to offer, I can’t recommend them
enough, and if you use our link, you can get 10% off anything on their website, plus you’ll be
supporting Half as Interesting while you’re at it.
