The Empty Flight Problem: What We Actually Know

An aircraft lands at Nice on a Friday afternoon. The passengers step off, the cars pull away, and a couple of hours later the same jet takes off again with nobody in the cabin, because it is needed in Farnborough on Saturday morning. Nobody buys that flight. It burns the same fuel as a full one.

Ask how often this happens and you will find the same figure repeated across the industry: somewhere between 30% and 40% of private jet flights are empty. It appears on broker websites, in trade articles and in investor decks. It is also, as far as we can establish, almost impossible to trace to an original source.

This is a guide to what is actually known about empty flying, why it happens, what it costs, and what is closing the gap.

Key takeaways

• Repositioning is structural to on-demand charter, not a sign of a badly run operation
• The commonly quoted 30% to 40% figure is widely repeated and hard to source. We could not find the study behind it
• There is a reason for that: the industry’s published data measures flight activity, not whether a flight carried passengers
• An empty sector costs almost exactly what a full one costs to operate, which is why empty legs are discounted so heavily
• The fix is a distribution problem, not a flying problem: unsold capacity and unmatched demand exist at the same time, in different places

The number everyone quotes

Search for how much of private aviation flies empty and you will land on 30% to 40% within a couple of clicks. It is often attributed to a trade body, sometimes to nobody at all, and the sources tend to cite each other rather than any underlying study.

We went looking for the original. We did not find it.

That is not an accusation. The figure may well be a reasonable estimate, and people who have spent careers in charter tend to nod at it rather than object. But there is a difference between a number the industry believes and a number the industry has measured, and it is worth being honest about which one this is.

Why it is hard to source

Here is the part that explains everything: the published data does not measure it.

The most widely cited flight-activity series in business aviation is ARGUS TRAQPak, which reports North American activity monthly and breaks it down by regulatory category, Part 135 for on-demand charter and jet cards, Part 91K for fractional, and Part 91 for owner flying, and by aircraft category from turboprops to large cabin.

What it reports is how much flying is happening. What it does not publish is whether any given flight had passengers aboard.

That distinction matters. The industry has good public data on activity and almost none on occupancy. So a question as basic as “what proportion of private flights are empty?” has no publicly verifiable answer, which is precisely how an unsourced estimate becomes conventional wisdom.

Commercial data products may hold more than their public summaries show, and we cannot see inside them. The honest statement is narrower and more useful: what is published measures volume, not emptiness.

What the data does tell us

Plenty, just not that. North American private jet flight hours rose 3.5% in 2025 according to ARGUS TRAQPak, continuing a pattern of activity well above pre-2020 levels. Notably, hours grew slightly faster than operations, which ARGUS put at around 3.4% for the year, meaning the average flight got marginally longer.

That is a good illustration of the point. We can measure how much flying happens, and even how far, with reasonable precision. We cannot say from any of it how many of those aircraft had somebody sitting in the back.

The Part 135 and Part 91K split does tell you how much of the market is genuinely on-demand versus programme flying, which matters here because the more on-demand the market becomes, the more repositioning it generates. That is the real insight available from the data: the trend line points towards more empty flying, not less, unless something changes in how capacity is matched to demand.

Why private jets fly empty

On-demand means one-way

Airlines solve this problem with networks. A scheduled carrier flies a route repeatedly, in both directions, and fills seats in each. Charter has no network. It goes where the client is going, once, and often in one direction only.

A client flying London to Nice on Friday does not create a Nice to London flight on Friday. Someone else might, but only by coincidence. The aircraft either waits for a return that may not come, or flies home empty.

Aircraft have homes

Every aircraft has a maintenance base, a crew base, and often an owner who expects it available on Monday. Those constraints are non-negotiable and they generate flying that has nothing to do with any client trip.

The positioning leg nobody sees

Many charters involve two empty sectors, not one: the aircraft flies to collect the client, and flies home after dropping them. If the aircraft is based two hours away from your departure airport, someone pays for those two hours. It is inside your quote, itemised or not.

This is why “why is this quote so expensive?” often has an unglamorous answer: you are paying for an aircraft to reach you.

What it actually costs

An empty sector costs what a full sector costs. Fuel burn is essentially identical, crew are paid, maintenance reserves accrue by the hour, and landing and handling fees are charged regardless of who was aboard.

That cost lands in one of three places:

• The operator absorbs it, reducing margin on the trip that caused it
• It is built into the client’s quote, raising the price of charter generally
• The leg is sold to someone else, recovering part of it

Which is why empty legs are discounted so aggressively. Operators and brokers commonly cite savings anywhere from 25% to 75% against standard charter pricing, depending on aircraft, route and notice. Treat that as an industry-cited range rather than a measured one, for the same reason as everything else in this post. The logic behind it, though, is simple: recovering part of a cost you have already committed to beats recovering none of it.

Looking at this from the passenger side? Our empty leg flights guide covers how to find and book them.

Why empty legs are hard to sell

If the economics are that clear, why does so much capacity still fly empty? Three reasons, and only the third is really solvable.

The timing problem

Empty legs materialise with days or hours of notice, because they are created by other people’s bookings. The buyer has to be flexible on date, time and often both airports. Most people booking private aviation are buying schedule control, which is the opposite of flexibility. The product suits a minority of buyers by design.

The matching problem

Selling an empty leg requires the right aircraft, in the right place, at the right moment, in front of a buyer who wants that specific movement, inside a window that might be forty-eight hours. Every additional constraint shrinks the pool.

The visibility problem

And this is the one that matters. An empty leg listed where nobody is looking is worth exactly as much as an empty leg nobody listed. Capacity sits in an operator’s system while demand sits somewhere else entirely, and the two never meet before the aircraft departs.

That is not an aviation problem. It is a distribution problem, and it is the reason marketplaces exist in this industry at all.

What is closing the gap

Distribution and marketplaces. Getting inventory in front of buyers in real time, rather than on a page that gets updated when someone remembers. This addresses the visibility problem directly, and it is where most of the industry’s recent effort has gone.

Dynamic pricing. A leg priced for four days’ notice should not carry the same price at four hours. Operators increasingly price to move as the window closes, which converts more of what would otherwise fly empty.

Better matching. The more interesting frontier: using routing and demand signals to create fewer empty legs in the first place, by chaining trips together so an aircraft finishes one job near the start of the next. Prevention beats discounting.

Shared and semi-scheduled models. Selling seats rather than aircraft on high-frequency routes improves utilisation genuinely, but it works only where demand is dense and repeatable, which is a small fraction of charter. It is a real contribution, not a general solution, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.

The sustainability question, honestly

An empty flight burns the same fuel as a full one and delivers nobody anywhere. There is no clever defence of that, and the industry should stop attempting one.

Filling repositioning legs is the rare intervention that is both commercially rational and environmentally better: the flight was going to happen anyway, and carrying passengers on it displaces a flight that would otherwise have been flown separately. That is a genuine improvement, and worth pursuing on both grounds.

It is also not an answer to the broader debate about private aviation’s environmental footprint, and presenting it as one would be dishonest. Reducing empty flying makes an inefficient thing less inefficient. That is worth doing. It is not the same as making it green, and this industry does itself no favours by blurring the two.

Frequently asked questions

Why do private jets fly empty? Because charter is on-demand rather than scheduled. Clients fly one way, aircraft have to return to maintenance bases, crew bases and owners, and aircraft often fly empty to collect a client before a trip begins.

What is a deadhead flight? The same underlying thing as an empty leg, viewed from the operator’s side. A deadhead is the non-revenue repositioning movement. An empty leg is that movement once it has been packaged and offered for sale.

How much of private aviation flies empty? Nobody can say precisely. A figure of 30% to 40% is widely quoted but hard to trace to an original study, and the industry’s published data tracks flight activity rather than whether flights carried passengers.

Are empty legs actually cheaper? Yes, usually substantially, with discounts commonly cited between 25% and 75% against standard charter pricing. The trade-off is that you accept the operator’s routing and timing rather than your own.

Why are empty legs so hard to find? They appear at short notice, suit only flexible travellers, and historically have been listed in places the right buyer was not looking. The last of those is the part the industry is actively fixing.

Closing thought

The most quoted statistic in private aviation may be unverifiable, but the underlying problem is not in dispute. A meaningful share of private flying carries nobody, the cost of that lands somewhere in every charter price, and the fix has more to do with connecting supply and demand than with anything that happens in a cockpit.

Lineaum works on the matching problem. You can see how at lineaum.com.

Related reading

• The Ultimate Guide to Empty Leg Flights: how to find and book them as a traveller
• Do Empty Leg Flights Save Money?: the price analysis
• How Private Jet Charter Works Behind the Scenes: brokers, operators, marketplaces and the chain between them