As the European Commission considers reimposing slot usage requirements, airlines have resumed efforts to lobby against any attempt to reinstate even a portion of the so-called “80-20 use it or lose it” rule on the continent and similar regulations worldwide. The rule, which before the pandemic required airlines to use at least 80 percent of their slots or risk losing them to competitors, remains lifted for the time being as a way to protect hub carriers' networks amid Covid-19 travel restrictions. However, the EC now has begun considering partially restoring the rule with a 60 percent use threshold for the winter season.
International Air Transport Association figures show that cross-border traffic measured as a percentage of 2019 levels has shown no improvement since October 2020. In fact, forward bookings in Europe reflect even lower demand for travel this winter than in the same period last year, underscoring the continued need for slot rule waivers. More than 60 percent of international flights operate from Level 3 slot-controlled airports, forming what IATA senior manager of worldwide airport slots Dimiter Zahariev called the backbone of international connectivity and networks.
“Those hub networks rely on precise slot times at those airports,” said Zahariev. “Our forecast is that international traffic may only recover to 32 percent of 2019 levels in the second half of 2021. And that is the important point here: that Level 3 airports play a very significant [role in] the recovery.”
In the UK, regulators in February eased that country’s 80-20 rule for the summer season to the great relief of airlines such as Virgin Atlantic, a strictly international hub carrier with no domestic traffic on which it can rely to help offset its severe service cuts during the pandemic. As in the EU, authorities in the UK have begun weighing options for the winter season.
Virgin Atlantic vice president of networks, alliances, and commercial planning Rikke Christensen recounted her airline’s “drastic steps” starting in the spring of 2020 to consolidate into just two hubs—London Heathrow and Manchester—and reduce staffing to 47 percent of 2019 levels. From April 10 to July 20 of last year, Virgin Atlantic operated no passenger flights, relying solely on a shift to cargo flying.
“We had to rebuild our entire operation to serve cargo-only routes with passenger aircraft,” she said. “We have been flying over 4,000 cargo-only routes and from the passenger side, when we restarted it, we had to really closely monitor to see where the demand is and try to actively find opportunities.”
Virgin needed to show considerable agility, a trait on which it had to rely to address the multitude of varying border restrictions around the world. The slot usage rule would have hindered the airline’s flexibility at a time it could least afford to do so, and force it to fly routes with no passengers aboard simply to maintain its slot rights, she explained.
“While we are still in this world where there are so many restrictions, so flexibility is actually needed, and we should not talk about removing flexibility before we see the restrictions being moved, because that's the reason that the flexibility is needed,” added Christensen.
“We also don’t know now what is coming in the winter season, and there will be regional differences in the recovery. There could be regions where you have had cargo-only demand that suddenly is no longer viable and passenger demand might not come back because of restrictions. So we are absolutely not in a world right now where we can say that, that we know exactly what to plan…and so full flexibility is absolutely needed.”