What Is a Positioning Flight?

How it works

A charter aircraft is normally based at a home airport, sometimes called its base or home base. When a client books a trip, the operator has to get the aircraft to the departure airport before the client's flight can begin. If the aircraft is not already sitting there, it has to fly there empty first. That empty flight is the positioning flight, sometimes called a repositioning leg or ferry leg.

The same thing can happen at the other end of a trip. If the aircraft has nowhere else to go after dropping the client off, it may fly empty back to its base, or on to its next job. That return leg is also a positioning flight.

A positioning flight is distinct from a deadhead, a related but separate term. A deadhead usually refers to crew, or occasionally non-revenue passengers, travelling on a flight to get into position for their next duty, whether or not the aircraft itself is otherwise empty. A positioning flight describes the aircraft's movement; a deadhead describes who is aboard it, or why. In practice the two overlap often, but a broker's or operator's paperwork will usually use one term or the other depending on what it is trying to describe.

The parties involved are the same as in any charter: the charter broker or the operator quoting the trip, and the client paying for it. Whether the client sees the positioning flight itemised separately, folded into the quoted price, or waived entirely depends on the operator's pricing structure and on how far the aircraft has to travel to reach the client.

Fractional programmes and card programmes with a floating fleet reduce the frequency of long positioning flights, because an aircraft is more likely to already be near the next departure point. A single aircraft charter operator working from one base has no such buffer, so positioning is a routine part of almost every quote it produces.

Cost impact

Positioning time appears on a quote or invoice as a separate line, often labelled "positioning", "repositioning" or "ferry time", or it may simply be built into the total price without being broken out. Whether it is itemised, and whether it is billed at the full hourly rate or a reduced ferry rate, is set by the operator's or broker's contract; there is no single industry rule, so a client comparing quotes should check what each one includes.

Most commonly, positioning is billed to the client at or close to the same hourly rate as the occupied leg of the trip. Some operators discount it, and some absorb it into the overall price on longer trips where it is a small proportion of total flying time. Because of this, an aircraft based near the departure airport will usually produce a cheaper quote than an otherwise identical aircraft based far away, even though the client's own flight is identical in both cases.

Positioning cost also interacts with the return leg. If an aircraft has another booking waiting at or near the client's destination, the operator may not need to fly it back empty at all, and the client's price may be lower as a result. If the aircraft has nowhere else to go, the operator may add the cost of flying it home, sometimes described in a contract as a repositioning cost, to the quote.

A one-way charter is the case where positioning cost is most visible, because the client is, in effect, paying for the aircraft's journey there without a paying journey back to offset it.

Example

Suppose, for illustration, a client wants to charter a light jet from Bristol to Edinburgh, and the nearest available aircraft is based at Farnborough rather than at Bristol. At an illustrative hourly rate of £5,000, and an illustrative flight time of 40 minutes from Farnborough to Bristol, the positioning leg alone might add roughly £3,300 to the quote before the client's own flight to Edinburgh is even costed.

If, instead, an operator has an aircraft already sitting at Bristol because of an earlier booking, that positioning cost disappears from the quote entirely, and the two quotes for what looks like "the same flight" can differ by a similar amount purely because of where each aircraft started. This is why two brokers quoting the same route on the same day can return noticeably different prices, and why a quote request that names the client's home airport, rather than just the route, tends to produce a more accurate figure.