Jan 11, 2022 10:53 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 11, 2022 10:59 PM by C C.)
Thousands of planes will fly empty in Europe just to keep their airport slots
https://www.zmescience.com/science/empty...-11012022/
EXCERPTS: . . . airlines are flying thousands of empty airplanes in order to secure their takeoff and landing places. This is because airlines have to use 50% of their slots in order to keep them, but that’s becoming tricky with lower bookings due to the Oricon variant. Ergo, there will be a lot of empty flights and ghost planes in the coming months.
Before the pandemic, ghost flights were very rare, though not unheard of. [...] Most recently, Lufthansa, one of Europe’s largest aviation companies, flew 18,000 empty flights just to keep its take-off and landing rights at a major airport ... Lufthansa isn’t alone in this, and several other companies are reporting similar woes...
Slots at airports are managed based on guidelines from the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Airlines make their request before each summer and winter season and an independent slot coordinator does the allocation. Usual rules for slots allocation says a company must use at least 80% of it slots so not to lose them to another carrier.
The US and the EU suspended this rule in March 2020 to alleviate pressure on companies to fly their planes almost or entirely empty during the peak of the pandemic. Instead, a 50% threshold was set until the end of March 2022 – which would be extended to the end of the summer, according to the Brussels Times. But even this 50% threshold is proving hard to sustain... (MORE - missing details)
How to protect US science from political meddling after Trump
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00059-w
INTRO: US federal agencies need to strengthen the policies that protect science used in government decision-making. They should also create a scientific-integrity council spanning many agencies, to help address political meddling by government officials. Those are some of the top conclusions of a long-awaited report from a task force convened by US President Joe Biden’s administration, in the wake of four years of science — and scientists — being undermined under former president Donald Trump.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released the report, which tackles the thorny topic of scientific integrity in the federal government, on 11 January. High-profile examples of scientific integrity being violated include a 2019 incident in which Trump said that a hurricane was threatening parts of Alabama, even though a weather-forecast office said it wasn’t; the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration then criticized government scientists for contradicting Trump. “Political intrusion into the conduct, management, communication, and use (or misuse) of science has a severe impact on public trust in federal science,” says the report.
The report calls on agencies to increase accountability for those found to have violated scientific-integrity principles. It also recommends updating policies to incorporate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“It really is amazing to see the Biden administration take this issue so seriously, especially after what we witnessed” under Trump, says Jacob Carter, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC, who studies scientific integrity. But several aspects need more work, he says: for example, agencies need to flesh out what accountability would really look like.
Restoring trust
The task force includes around 50 experts from 29 government agencies, spearheaded by Alondra Nelson, the OSTP’s deputy director for science and society, and Jane Lubchenco, the office’s deputy director for climate and environment. It was created after Biden issued a memorandum in January 2021, one week into his presidency, calling for “restoring trust in government through scientific integrity and evidence-based policymaking”. The task force began its work in May and, following public meetings and listening sessions, has now issued its full report.
It is a “superb job”, says John Holdren, who headed OSTP between 2009 and 2017 as former president Barack Obama’s science adviser. “It represents an entirely new standard on this critical issue.”
The report’s authors say this is only the first step: future work will involve putting the recommendations into practice across government in the coming months. “It is a process,” Nelson told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) last month. “We will always be working on scientific integrity.”
The question now is whether federal agencies can strengthen their scientific-integrity policies to be truly effective against challenges such as those that arose during Trump’s presidency. “By elevating the importance of this issue...it is our hope that we can minimize the likelihood of future violations,” Lubchenco says.
Many agencies already had such policies when Trump took office in 2017. They simply were not strong enough to withstand the suppression of science that occurred. One major problem was that top officials were sometimes involved in integrity breaches — and agencies struggled with how to respond to such events... (MORE - details)
https://www.zmescience.com/science/empty...-11012022/
EXCERPTS: . . . airlines are flying thousands of empty airplanes in order to secure their takeoff and landing places. This is because airlines have to use 50% of their slots in order to keep them, but that’s becoming tricky with lower bookings due to the Oricon variant. Ergo, there will be a lot of empty flights and ghost planes in the coming months.
Before the pandemic, ghost flights were very rare, though not unheard of. [...] Most recently, Lufthansa, one of Europe’s largest aviation companies, flew 18,000 empty flights just to keep its take-off and landing rights at a major airport ... Lufthansa isn’t alone in this, and several other companies are reporting similar woes...
Slots at airports are managed based on guidelines from the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Airlines make their request before each summer and winter season and an independent slot coordinator does the allocation. Usual rules for slots allocation says a company must use at least 80% of it slots so not to lose them to another carrier.
The US and the EU suspended this rule in March 2020 to alleviate pressure on companies to fly their planes almost or entirely empty during the peak of the pandemic. Instead, a 50% threshold was set until the end of March 2022 – which would be extended to the end of the summer, according to the Brussels Times. But even this 50% threshold is proving hard to sustain... (MORE - missing details)
How to protect US science from political meddling after Trump
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00059-w
INTRO: US federal agencies need to strengthen the policies that protect science used in government decision-making. They should also create a scientific-integrity council spanning many agencies, to help address political meddling by government officials. Those are some of the top conclusions of a long-awaited report from a task force convened by US President Joe Biden’s administration, in the wake of four years of science — and scientists — being undermined under former president Donald Trump.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released the report, which tackles the thorny topic of scientific integrity in the federal government, on 11 January. High-profile examples of scientific integrity being violated include a 2019 incident in which Trump said that a hurricane was threatening parts of Alabama, even though a weather-forecast office said it wasn’t; the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration then criticized government scientists for contradicting Trump. “Political intrusion into the conduct, management, communication, and use (or misuse) of science has a severe impact on public trust in federal science,” says the report.
The report calls on agencies to increase accountability for those found to have violated scientific-integrity principles. It also recommends updating policies to incorporate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“It really is amazing to see the Biden administration take this issue so seriously, especially after what we witnessed” under Trump, says Jacob Carter, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC, who studies scientific integrity. But several aspects need more work, he says: for example, agencies need to flesh out what accountability would really look like.
Restoring trust
The task force includes around 50 experts from 29 government agencies, spearheaded by Alondra Nelson, the OSTP’s deputy director for science and society, and Jane Lubchenco, the office’s deputy director for climate and environment. It was created after Biden issued a memorandum in January 2021, one week into his presidency, calling for “restoring trust in government through scientific integrity and evidence-based policymaking”. The task force began its work in May and, following public meetings and listening sessions, has now issued its full report.
It is a “superb job”, says John Holdren, who headed OSTP between 2009 and 2017 as former president Barack Obama’s science adviser. “It represents an entirely new standard on this critical issue.”
The report’s authors say this is only the first step: future work will involve putting the recommendations into practice across government in the coming months. “It is a process,” Nelson told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) last month. “We will always be working on scientific integrity.”
The question now is whether federal agencies can strengthen their scientific-integrity policies to be truly effective against challenges such as those that arose during Trump’s presidency. “By elevating the importance of this issue...it is our hope that we can minimize the likelihood of future violations,” Lubchenco says.
Many agencies already had such policies when Trump took office in 2017. They simply were not strong enough to withstand the suppression of science that occurred. One major problem was that top officials were sometimes involved in integrity breaches — and agencies struggled with how to respond to such events... (MORE - details)