Is an Empty Leg Charter Service Your Best Option for Flying Private?

March 1, 2017 – 8:00AM

Written by: Captain David Koch

Is An Empty Leg Charter Service Your Best Option for Flying Private?

If you’ve been considering private-jet services, you have undoubtedly come across “empty legs”.  Most retail charter operators offer empty legs to their customers, and several online platforms like Skyjet, Jetsmarter and many others offer to connect you with charter operators who have them available.  But, what is an “empty leg”.

These flights are known by pilots as “deadhead” or “repositioning” flights.  Simply put, an empty-leg flight is an already-paid-for charter-jet flight with no paying passengers on the airplane.  Empty legs are generated when passengers are dropped off or picked up at a location other than the aircraft’s home base.  The charter operator must deadhead the airplane, or reposition it, back to home base after dropping off paying passengers at another location, or deadhead the airplane from home base to where the paying passengers want to be picked up.

In either case, the passengers who chartered the flight have paid for both the “occupied” leg of the flight and the empty leg as part of the overall charter fee.  Since the charter operator has already recovered the cost of the empty-leg flight and made a profit on it, the operator can charge what the market will bear for the empty leg.  Sometimes, the market will support the sale of empty legs at full-retail-charter prices and at other times at steep discounts.  In most cases, you won’t know what the actual price of the empty-leg flight will be until you book it.  And keep in mind that the empty leg that you book can be cancelled at the last minute due to a change of plans by the passengers who booked the underlying charter flight.

Availability of Empty Leg Flights is Sporadic

As an empty-leg customer, it is often difficult-to-impossible to match your travel requirements to the availability of an empty-leg flight.  There are millions of airport combinations in the U.S. where empty-leg flights can originate and terminate.  And since there are less than an estimated 100 empty-leg flights available in the U.S. each day (many of them going to/from remote airports in small towns), it can be a daunting challenge to find an empty leg that matches your travel requirements and is also priced below full-retail-charter rates.

So What Should You Do

My recommendation is that you consider using empty-leg charters only as a supplement to a more robust private-jet-access solution.  And, I also suggest that you don’t fall for empty-leg services offerings that require you pay a significant upfront fee to access their empty-leg system.  In most cases, you will find that you will be lucky to match your travel requirements to an available empty leg at a reasonable price more than once or twice a year.  If you are currently talking with an empty-leg service, demand that they provide you with data relevant to their success rate in matching customers with empty legs.

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