Airlines are at odds with the EU over rules that require them to use their takeoff and landing slots at airports even when they don’t have enough passengers to justify flights. Airlines are being forced to fly thousands of nearly empty planes — sometimes called “ghost flights” — as travel plummets because of Omicron infections. In recent weeks, several European carriers, including Lufthansa and Brussels Airlines, have said they need to cancel thousands of fights because they are not booked enough to be profitable. But they are being squeezed by EU rules that require them to use their valuable airport slots or risk losing them, potentially to rival carriers. The rules, which normally require airlines to use at least 80 percent of their allocated slots at airports, were waived in early 2020 as the coronavirus hit the continent. But since then, the bloc has begun reinstating them, and last month the EC set the threshold to 50% for the winter travel season. “Now the threshold for maintaining slots is raised again, and this means that if we cancel these 3,000 flights, we would lose our slots at multiple airports,” Maaike Andries, a spokeswoman for Brussels Airlines, said Thursday. “This is something that any airline must avoid of course.” Pre-assigned takeoff and landing slots are common at Europe’s crowded airports, and are used to allocate space and prevent chaos among different airlines. In the United States, only three airports maintain slots — Kennedy and La Guardia in New York and Ronald Reagan National in Washington — and the FAA waived them early on in the pandemic and most recently extended them through March this year. In announcing its decision to set the restriction at 50% capacity on Dec. 15, Adina Valean, the EU commissioner for transport, acknowledged concerns about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, but said the move was aimed at helping airlines return to capacity by the summer. Carsten Spohr, CE of the Lufthansa Group, said his company had to cancel 33,000 flights, roughly 10 percent of those scheduled for the winter season. Other flights took off but were nowhere near fully booked. <br/>
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Turkey's flag-carrier Turkish Airlines said Friday it was cancelling all flights to Kazakhstan until Jan. 9 due to "negative developments" in the former Soviet nation, after days of violence in the country. Security forces appeared to have reclaimed the streets of Kazakhstan's main city on Friday, while the country's Russian-backed president said he had ordered his troops to shoot-to-kill to put down a countrywide uprising. Turkish Airlines said its flight personnel in Almaty would be flown back to Istanbul on Saturday, while other evacuation measures for the personnel in the capital Nur-Sultan were being evaluating.<br/>