It is wrong and a total waste of resources.... unless it was your plane. Maybe you were taking a flight to a funeral, wedding, or genuinely career altering business meeting? AA might have to take flack from some but if they didn't honor their commitment people would be screaming from every media outlet in the country. Airlines have to to be careful they get bad press left and right nowadays.

Simply put... the big airlines have to find a clever marketing strategy to get butts into seats.

I remember a "vagabond" campaign started by one of the big airlines several years ago. For a pittance you could get on a flight. The catch was you had no idea where you were going or what to pack.
You could end up in Honolulu or you could end up in Cleveland.

Sounds like a fun exciting vacation to me!

They already have incentives against doing that (obviously they lost money on that flight). The surprising thing is not that they don't do it more, it is that they do it at all.

As oil gets more expensive, they'll do it even less.

Interesting. I really would have thought that they would have made up some weather or moved them to another carrier and paid the price to get out of the route.

It was a waste of resources... including their own.... one attendant to each passenger adds up to a huge lose of money

On the whole Flying is Dying debate, I would love to see the US put in high speed trains on routes like LA/ SF, KC/ STL, etc, but there is no political will for it. China (where I live) knocks these things out like GM knocks out H2 Humvees, and the demand continues to outstrip supply.

r
www.china-crossroads.com

Flight scheduling is immensely complicated. It is not uncommon to have to move empty planes across the world so they will be in position for part of a schedule. This is especially common after irregular operations (weather, breakdowns, etc.) interrupts a particular plane's schedule. If airlines didn't do this we'd all be sitting around for days waiting for a plane to take us on our scheduled flight. There are far bigger, easier to correct problems we can worry about.

They do have to reposition their planes, or their network breaks down, with all its consequent inefficiencies. Although I'm sure they could be MORE fuel conscious than they are, that doesn't mean their network doesn't have occaisional inefficiencies. They invest brainpower into getting the most (paying)passengers moved with the least wasted money.

After all, new planes recycle air in order to cut down on drag, saving fuel, and use all kinds of exotic metals and technologies to save fuel. And fuel has ALWAYS been a massive input for airlines, and fuel savings has always been a profit source.

It's inefficient to drive to the mall to buy a button, but if you need a matching button for a job interview, otherwise you lose your house, drive to the mall.

I wonder if the same uber-greenies would be the first to complain if their airplane wasn't on time or was cancelled.

-"Well ladies and gentlemen, your flight is cancelled because the airplane that was supposed to pick you up was cancelled due to lack of filled seats."
Oh my airplane is late! Sheesh! Where's the nearest Starbucks!!? This is unacceptable!!
ME ME ME !! Some people just aren't happy unless they're complaining about something.

I was on a wierd flight once from Jacksonville to Fort Lauderdale or Miami for business. (It was part of a regular connection from someplace else so it wasn't like it was just a shuttle from those 2 places). Anyway, I was late doing stuff at Jacksonville and I missed the last flight.
I went to the airport late and they 'found something' for me at the same price.
So there I was ... I had a whole cabin section to myself. I think there were only 4 or 5 other people and some crew on the plane I think a 737?

I asked what's up with all the room and they said it was a 'positioning flight'.
Granted, moving a mid-sized jet from one end of Florida to the other is different from going from halfway through the the US to 'across the pond'.
But one flight was cancelled anyway and the airplane was needed 'over there' anyway.
I wonder how many half to nearly empty airplanes FedEx or UPS or DHL flies around.

Advances -
I remember 'in the good old days' when there was an observation deck at JFK. You could have a bite and watch the airplanes roll around and take off and land and see the Concorde move it's super rich around. Totally impossible now for anyone but ticket holders and sunglasses salespeople.
The smoke trails of the 707s and DC-8s would last for miles and hang there for quite some time.

Now you look behind most jets and don't see much coming out the exhaust. They are also quieter. My point is, hopefully one day, aviation won't be the scourge it is now. More than my 2c. Sorry.
vsk

Sometimes there are minimum passenger counts, as on a boat I used to work on. They could do that. Already airlines have overbooked planes for years, so how is it different if your plane doesn't go or it goes without you? To the stranded person it's no different, but in this case energy and emissions wise, it's vastly different.

I agree with Nick...You know if you were one of those 5 people and you needed to get to London for whatever reason (vacation, business, wedding) I bet you would be P.O.'d if the flight attendant said "We're sorry, but this flight has been canceled so we can be environmentally responsible. You will have to wait for the next flight, assuming the plane is at least half full. Thank you for flying with American Airlines." You can't win these days. People get mad if a flight is over-booked and now they are getting mad for a flight being under-booked. Sheesh!

Airlines don't really care about inconveniencing passengers. If it was economically better, they would have cancelled the flight. They don't care. This was repositioning, not a desire to serve the customer.

A simple emissions analysis shows that flying is NOT like being on a bus. We should stop expecting a plane to show up at our corner every five minutes.

Mainstream consensus is that we must cut 90% of our emissions by 2050. Many scientists (Hansen, Weaver) think we must cut 100% a lot sooner, and that if we don't, hundreds of millions or billions of people will die, along with half of the species on the planet.

In the face of this, do we really want to hasten those deaths with frivolous jaunts on not-full planes? Our attitudes towards flying will be changing very shortly, or they will be changed for us. As JH Kunstler says, "Nature assigns a new negotiating partner--Reality".

Check out this post at Climate Progress. Ouch. http://climateprogress.org/2008/03/05/media-enable-denier-spin-ii-what-if-the-msm-simply-cant-cover-humanitys-self-destruction/#more-2363

AA had a choice: end up on Treehugger or Consumerist. Bad PR either way.

You have to look at the averages though. AA probably cancels far more flights than they fly nearly empty, so the cancellation of their other flights easily offsets the planes they fly with few passengers.

US tax law allows them to deduct the cost of the fuel but only capitalize the cost of planes.

This faulty government policy makes it cheaper to waste fuel than buy more planes to simplify scheduling.

If it was just the passangers that needed to be moved, they almost certainly would have put them on another flight, even from a different company.

I'm confused. Airlines overbook flight to make sure they are full, for (financial) efficiency. They have no problem telling passengers they've been bumped. Seems like it would have been normal to bump these five to the next plane. Give them first class or the typical hotel accommodations. Sure, I'd be pissed. But it's the airlines. If you go in expecting excellent customer service, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

What do you suppose all those oil tankers are carrying on their way back to Saudi Arabia? Not every leg of every trip can be a full load...

I will say what I've been saying for years. There is room in the market for a new low-cost enviro carrier. Huge room. How you do it:

This requires a very integrated reservation system. You book a flight for Mon-Wed to San Francisco. When the plane is fully booked you get the time that you will be flying. Say, Monday evening. It would require more flexibility on the part of the travellers but every plane would be full and the planes would be used quite efficiently.

Its what happens in Africa with their "buses" as the cost of gas isn't worth going down the road there unless you have a really full load.

There is room here for innovation and cultural change to adopt to the changing realities of energy in our world. I think this might be a step - but trains will be beating out planes before I'm dead.

They may have at least maxed out the cargo weight so they made it pay somewhat but the article doesn't tell us that. With almost no passengers a whole lot of payload is freed up.

Environmentalists have become so obsessed with "carbon footprints," that they can't see the forest for the trees. The fact that the handful of passengers' individual "footprints" were larger than they would be on a fully loaded flight did not increase the amount of fuel used. In fact, with less weight on the plane, there was less fuel used than on a flight with a lot more passengers. So if anything, it was a more "environmentally friendly" flight than normal. It was a scheduled flight that was being made anyway (and there was a full plane load coming back the other way), so no fuel was "wasted." A little fuel was actually saved.

While I'm disappointed in the waste, it moved a large enough plane to London to get the travelers from there back to Westbound. If they had used a smaller plane that minimized fuel for the eastbound flight, they would've had to use multiple planes for the westbound.

So I think that AA was in the right doing this, but I think the problem lies with the industry, not just a single flight.

I think there is something strange about this flight. I have gone to the airport only to find out that my flight was not full so they needed to put me on another flight. How much in salary did AA expend to the crews of this flight and how much fuel? Seems like a waste. They had empty oxygen tanks and a faulty defibrillator on board and a woman died, but the spent $$$ to fly FIVE passengers to the UK. Something is wrong here. What was in the cargo???

It would be useful to know how often this happens. The key metric is the average occupancy and average per seat mile fuel use for the whole company. Networks of any kind are hard to build so they run at full capacity all the time. As fuel becomes a priority, airlines will adapt by having more planes, better scheduling, or other solutions.

But you need to look at the whole system. A single flight says little, though this extreme case does look like a hint that they could do a better job.