What Is an Empty Leg Flight?

How it works

Charter aircraft rarely fly a neat round trip for one client. A jet might fly a client from London to Nice, then need to return to its base, or reposition to Geneva for its next booked charter, with no passenger aboard. That unpaid repositioning leg is called a positioning flight, and when it is flown with crew but no fare-paying passenger it is also called a deadhead leg from the operator's point of view.

An empty leg flight is that same leg offered for sale. Instead of absorbing the cost of flying it empty, the operator, or a broker acting for several operators, advertises the route, date and aircraft type and looks for a passenger willing to buy it, usually at short notice. The buyer is generally chartering the whole aircraft for that specific one-way sector, not an individual seat.

This is different from a standard charter booking, where a client sets the route and date and the operator finds or repositions an aircraft to match. With an empty leg, the aircraft, route and timing already exist and are fixed by the operator's underlying schedule; the client is buying into a slot that was going to happen anyway.

It is also worth distinguishing empty legs from the United States' 14 CFR Part 380 public charter framework, current as of 22 September 2026. Part 380, administered by the US Department of Transportation, is a separate mechanism that lets a charter operator or a Part 380 organiser sell individual seats on a flight to the public, rather than chartering the whole aircraft to one buyer. An empty leg sold in the ordinary way is normally a whole-aircraft charter of a pre-existing repositioning leg; a Part 380 flight is a seats-based public offering built around a route the operator wants to run. The two can occasionally overlap in marketing but rest on different commercial structures. There is no direct EU (EASA) or UK (CAA) equivalent of Part 380; empty legs in Europe are typically marketed and sold as whole-aircraft charters through brokers or operator networks.

Cost impact

Empty legs appear on the bill as a single discounted charter fare for a one-way sector, rather than the round-trip or multi-leg pricing a standard charter would carry. Because the aircraft's positioning cost would be incurred by the operator regardless of whether a client is aboard, an operator can price the seat, or rather the whole aircraft for that leg, below what it would charge to fly the same route from scratch.

Discounts vary widely by operator, route, aircraft type and how close to departure the leg is being sold, so no single percentage applies market-wide; a reader comparing listings should treat any quoted discount range as marketing language rather than a fixed rule. The trade-off for the lower price is reduced flexibility: the date, time and routing are fixed by the underlying repositioning need, the flight can be cancelled or rescheduled if the original charter that created the leg changes, and there is typically no guarantee of a refund or a replacement flight if that happens. Handling fees, catering and any positioning beyond the advertised sector are usually still charged separately and are not folded into the discounted headline rate.

Example

Suppose, for illustration, an operator flies a client from Farnborough to Palma on a Friday and then needs the aircraft back at Farnborough for a booked charter on Sunday. Flying that return sector empty would cost the operator an illustrative $9,000 in crew and fuel costs with no revenue against it.

Instead the operator lists the Palma to Farnborough leg as an empty leg for Saturday at an illustrative $4,500, roughly half of what a client booking that same one-way sector from scratch might expect to pay at an illustrative standard one-way rate of $9,500. A buyer who can travel on the fixed Saturday slot pays the $4,500 and the operator recovers part of a cost it would otherwise have absorbed in full; a buyer who needs a different day or a return sector gains nothing from the listing.