Why Qatar Airways Flies An Almost-Empty Flight to Adelaide

Every morning, at 535am, 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 know that airlines are doing everything 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 going to be a long four and a half minutes. To understand this flight, there are a few basic things you need to understand first. 1. This is an airplane. 2. Airplanes are sometimes owned by airlines. 3. 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 1 and level 2 airports, this can be a simple formality, but with busier level 3 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 playbuttons. Sorry, what was that? The 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 going to 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 in 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 going to 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 nine 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 QR-988 touches down in Melbourne at 1130pm, 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 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's off the hook if Qantas goes bankrupt, and we're all 20 metric tons of carbon per day closer to being cooked alive on our own hell planet. Anyways, 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. 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