What are empty legs, and how do you catch one?

The one real discount in private aviation: same aircraft, same crew, a fraction of the price. How empty legs arise, what they truly save, and when to skip one.

Every private flight leaves an aircraft somewhere. It lands in Nice on a Friday evening with four passengers and their luggage, and by Saturday morning it is a multi-million-euro asset parked on an apron where nobody needs it. It has to get back to its home base, or on to wherever its next booking begins. That repositioning flight is flown empty — and because it is happening regardless, the operator would rather sell it cheaply than fly it for nothing. That is an empty leg.

Why the aircraft is flying anyway

The economics are simpler than they look. An operator’s fixed costs — crew salaries, hangarage, maintenance reserves, insurance — run whether the aircraft moves or not. What a repositioning flight adds on top is fuel, landing and handling fees, and crew duty hours. Selling that leg at any price above those marginal costs beats selling nothing at all, which is why operators list them and accept far less than they would ever quote for the same route on demand.

What decides when a leg appears is usually the airport, not the operator. Geneva closes departures at 21:26, so a client whose dinner runs long stays the night and the aircraft that was meant to reposition at 22:00 leaves at dawn instead. Paris–Le Bourget will not take a jet heavier than 5.7 tonnes between 22:15 and 06:00. London City shuts at 22:30 on weekdays, closes early on Saturday afternoon and does not reopen until Sunday lunchtime — so a weekend charter into the City nearly always produces a repositioning flight from somewhere else. Learn the curfews and you can very nearly predict where the empty legs will be.

What you actually save

This is where most published numbers deserve to be ignored. The range quoted across the industry is 25 to 75 per cent, and the upper half of it is marketing. Comparing our own listings against our own on-demand pricing for the same city pair gives a far more useful answer.

London to Nice is quoted indicatively from about €9,500 one way as a normal charter — the figure on our London to Nice route page. The same city pair as an empty leg on an Embraer Phenom 300, seven seats, the aircraft most people would have booked anyway, lists at €6,500. That is roughly a third off a flight which is identical in every respect a passenger can perceive.

Recent legs from our own list, to give the shape of it:

• Cannes to Milan, Citation Mustang, four seats — €4,200.
• London to Nice, Phenom 300, seven seats — €6,500.
• Zurich to Palma, Citation XLS+, eight seats — €7,500.
• Geneva to Olbia, Challenger 350, nine seats — €12,500.

A quarter to two-fifths off is the honest expectation. Deeper discounts do exist — an operator with an aircraft in the wrong place and a maintenance slot booked for tomorrow will take almost anything — but they are not what you should plan around.

The catch, stated plainly

The date belongs to the aircraft

An empty leg exists because another booking created it. You are fitting yourself into someone else’s schedule, on their date and at roughly their hour. If your own travel dates are fixed to the day, most legs are simply not available to you, and no amount of searching changes that.

It can move, and it can vanish

The original booking is the one the operator cares about. If the client who created the leg pushes their return back a day, the repositioning flight moves with them. If they cancel, the leg disappears altogether. Anyone who tells you an empty leg is guaranteed is telling you something other than the truth.

One way, and only one way

There is no return included. The aircraft is going somewhere for its own reasons and will not wait for you. Getting back is a separate problem — a scheduled flight, a charter, or another empty leg you may or may not find in time.

The airport may not be the one you asked for

The leg departs from wherever the aircraft happens to be, which may be Luton rather than Farnborough, or Le Bourget rather than Orly. Thirty minutes of extra driving in exchange for a third off the price is usually a trade worth making — but it should be a decision you took, not a surprise on the day. Our London and Geneva pages set out which airport suits which part of each city.

Where empty legs actually appear

They cluster on the routes that generate one-way demand, which in Europe means the wealth corridors and the seasons. Summer moves aircraft south and west — London, Geneva and Zurich into Nice, Ibiza, Palma, Olbia and Mykonos — and sends them north again empty a day or two later. Winter reverses it: the Alps pull traffic into Geneva, Sion and Courchevel while the Mediterranean legs dry up. Late August has a pattern of its own, as the season unwinds and aircraft leave the islands: Ibiza to Geneva, Málaga to Marrakech, Milan back to base.

Which is why the useful question is not “do you have an empty leg to Nice” but “what is moving near my dates”. Our current empty legs page is the live answer to that; the London to Geneva and Geneva to Ibiza pages carry the on-demand figures to measure any offer against.

How to catch one

Browsing lists is the least effective method available, because the leg that would have suited you probably was not on the list at the moment you looked. Being matched works considerably better.

• Give a route and a window, not a date. “Nice, somewhere in the first ten days of September” finds things. “Nice on 4 September” usually does not.
• Name the nearby airports you will accept — Cannes–Mandelieu as well as Nice, Luton as well as Farnborough. Every airport you add multiplies your chances.
• Be reachable and be quick. Good legs are gone within hours; if an answer takes a day, the answer is academic.
• Decide your walk-away price in advance, so that saying yes takes thirty seconds rather than an evening.
• Ask us to watch the market. Most legs never reach a public list at all — they move between operators and brokers first.

Give us the route and the window and we watch it for you, including legs departing from airports near the one you searched rather than only the exact one. If nothing matches this week, that is normal rather than a bad sign: new legs appear daily.

When an empty leg is the wrong answer

If you have a board meeting in Zurich at nine, charter the aircraft. If you are travelling with people who cannot be inconvenienced, charter the aircraft. If the trip only works as a same-day return, an empty leg cannot do it at all. The discount is real, but it is paid for in flexibility, and there are trips where you have none to spend. On those, a light jet on demand starts from around €3,300 an hour and does exactly what you need, at the hour you need it — which is what private jet charter is for.

Tell us where you want to go and roughly when. If an empty leg fits, we will find it; if it does not, we will say so plainly and quote the flight properly instead.