Northwest Airlines would often use their new wide body aircraft for domestic operations to meet the qualification requirements to operate long distances.

When we left a few days later, we where greeted by a man at the checkout. No name tag, wearing a black suit. Spoke perfect german. Casually talking to us while we checked out. To this day I wonder if he was from Mossad or something. It was strange. It‘s pretty easy to develop some kind of paranoia in this setting.^^ Eilat itself was nice, though. Many Russians where on vacation there back in the days.

On our flight back, we boarded the plane with three other people.

Airlines need a certain amount of flights to keep their gate slots at airports.

Ghost flights were a thing during COVID. You had airlines burning 30,000 to 80,000 gallons of fuel and putting tons of pollution into the air for empty flights just to maintain gate slots.

I was expecting this article to be about these types of ghost flights.

> The rule: At busy airports, airlines must use their allocated takeoff and landing slots for a certain percentage of their scheduled flights (typically 80%) to retain them for the next season.

> Regulatory response: The rule was initially relaxed in March 2020 but was later reintroduced with lower thresholds, such as 50% or 70%, which still compelled airlines to operate some unnecessary flights.

Perhaps testing a trans-Atlantic flight using a narrow-body. Currently, everyone only flies wide-body aircraft. This may be a feasibility test to fly smaller aircraft (737, A320, etc) transatlantic and train narrow-body check airmen in transatlantic crossings.

This would be an interesting change and development.

The under-the-breath takeaway from this, is that AA is training its pilots on Airbus. Actually, it's training its pilot trainers on Airbus.