What Is an Empty Leg Flight? A Broker Explains

A repositioning flight sold at a discount — minus the marketing.

Get Empty Leg Alerts

Empty Leg Guides · 14 min read

Home / Empty Leg Guides / What Is an Empty Leg Flight

By Pat Sinnott, Founder of Peak Aviation Solutions. Commercial multi-engine rated pilot, 21 years in private aviation, ran a 21-aircraft charter fleet before starting Peak in Bozeman, Montana.

Last updated: July 4, 2026

You’ve probably seen the ads. “Fly private for up to 75% off.” Then you click through, the flight you want doesn’t exist, and the one that does exist leaves from the wrong airport on the wrong day. So what is an empty leg flight really, and is the discount real?

I quote anywhere from 35 to 67 charter trips a month depending on the season, and I watch empty leg inventory every single day. The discount is real. So are the restrictions, and the restrictions are the part nobody puts in the ad. One of them kills more empty leg plans than everything else combined, and I’ll get to it below.

An empty leg flight is a repositioning flight: a private jet that has to fly empty from where its last trip ended to where its next trip begins. Operators sell those seats at a discount because some revenue beats flying an empty airplane. If the route and date happen to match your plans, it’s the cheapest way to fly private.

In this guide:

  • What an empty leg flight actually is
  • Why operators discount them
  • What one really costs, with real numbers
  • The catch the listings leave out
  • Who should book one, and who shouldn’t
  • Bozeman, the Mountain West, and nationwide
  • How to actually find these flights
  • FAQ

What an empty leg flight actually is

Charter aircraft don’t live at one airport waiting for you. They finish a trip in one city and often need to be somewhere else for the next customer, or back at their home base.

That repositioning flight has to happen whether anyone is on board or not. The crew is paid, the fuel is burned, the airplane moves. An empty leg flight is simply that flight with you in the cabin instead of empty seats. Pilots and brokers also call them deadhead flights, ferry legs, or repositioning flights; same thing, different jargon.

When someone calls and asks me what is an empty leg flight, I give them that two-sentence version. Then I walk them through the fine print, because the fine print is where these deals are won or lost.

Here’s a real example of how one gets created. A family charters a jet from Bozeman to San Francisco for a week in wine country. The operator doesn’t leave a multimillion dollar airplane parked at SFO for seven days. It flies home empty, and that Bozeman-bound return shows up as an empty leg.

If you happen to want to go from the Bay Area to Montana that afternoon, you just found the cheapest private flight you’ll ever take. That’s the entire concept. The rest of this post is about what the listings don’t tell you.

Why operators discount an empty leg flight

Most charter aircraft are owned by individuals, not by the operator. The owner lets the operator sell charter on the airplane to offset their costs, and the operator’s first job is making that owner the most money possible.

That single fact explains almost everything about empty leg pricing.

A repositioning flight earns the owner nothing. So when an operator can sell that leg for real money, even at 40 or 50 percent below retail, it’s found revenue. They would rather get something than fly the airplane empty.

It also explains why operators don’t just discount everything. A regular charter is sold at the full hourly rate because it has to be. Discount the whole calendar and the economics of owning and operating the aircraft stop working. The discount exists only where the airplane was going to fly anyway.

There’s a timing wrinkle inside that logic, and it’s the single most useful thing I can teach you about this market. I call it the 5-Day Rule.

The 5-Day Rule

An empty leg flight posted two months out is usually priced near regular retail. Why? Because the operator still has two months to sell that leg as a full-price charter. Their incentive to discount is close to zero.

Inside about five days, the math flips. The odds of selling the leg at retail shrink fast, and the price starts moving. Inside 72 hours, you have the most leverage you will ever have on a private flight.

So when you see an empty leg listed three weeks out at a price that looks like a normal charter quote, that’s not a scam. It’s just early. The discount you were promised lives inside the final five days.

What an empty leg flight really costs

Marketing sites love “up to 75% off.” Here’s what I actually see across our quote history.

A realistic working range is 25 to 50 percent below retail, with the deepest discounts on short notice. Occasionally a leg that absolutely must move tomorrow goes for half price or better. “Up to 75%” happens, but it’s the exception the ads are built on, not the average Tuesday.

Real numbers from our own bookings, so you can calibrate. A client of ours, primarily a NetJets flyer, subscribed to our alerts for the Missoula to Bay Area corridor. On a Monday he spotted an empty leg flight posted for Tuesday, right when a work meeting popped up.

His fractional program wanted a short-lead premium for that kind of pop-up trip. The empty leg went the other way entirely. Booking that same trip as a regular light jet charter runs about $18,000 with all taxes and fees.

He paid $8,500, all in, on a Phenom 300 with a fully vetted operator. Newer airplane than he expected, less than half the normal price, and he made his meeting.

For scale, here’s how the math looks on corridors we actually quote, from Peak’s own booking and quote history:

Corridor (light jet class) Regular charter, all-in Empty leg
Missoula to Bay Area about $18,000 $8,500 (a real 2026 booking)
LA area to Las Vegas $18,000 to $23,000 $5,000 to $7,000 typical
Bozeman to Phoenix/Scottsdale $22,000 to $24,500 (our booking average) discounts follow the 5-Day Rule

Those aren’t calculator estimates. They’re what trips have actually cost our clients.

One more thing on price. The listed number is the operator’s, not ours. As the broker we add our margin on top, and on a deeply discounted leg there’s room to keep the final price to you well under retail.

When you’re comparing an empty leg flight to a standard quote, always compare the all-in numbers, including the 7.5 percent federal excise tax and the per-passenger segment fees. That’s how we quote every trip, because surprise fees are how this industry loses people’s trust. A client once told me a competitor’s after-the-fact fee felt “like a money grab.” He wasn’t wrong, and we’ve priced all-in ever since.

“Pat’s communication is great and he has found us attractively priced flights.”

That’s from a client review on our empty legs page, and it’s the entire job description in one sentence: watch the inventory, tell you the truth about it, and get you the number that makes the trip worth taking.

The catch: what the listings don’t tell you

Now the part I promised you. The restriction that kills more empty leg plans than anything else isn’t the route or the price. It’s the departure window.

When an operator posts an empty leg for a specific date, that airplane usually has to move within a narrow slot between its last trip and its next one. In practice you get a one to three hour window, sometimes five if you’re lucky. Not “sometime Saturday.” More like “Saturday, wheels up between 1 and 3 pm.”

If your schedule can’t bend to that window, the deal doesn’t exist for you. That’s the honest version of the fine print.

The second catch: the leg can disappear. Twice this year we’ve had people from the Montana area ask about a posted leg, think it over for a couple of days, and come back inside 72 hours to book. Gone both times, sold to another trip entirely.

On a leg like the Missoula one above, thinking it over for two days isn’t a small delay. It’s a $9,500 decision, the gap between the empty leg price and paying full retail for the same airplane.

The third catch is the one I’d want explained to me before booking. Your empty leg flight exists because of someone else’s trip. If that primary trip cancels or moves, your flight can vanish through no fault of yours.

It happened to one of our clients: the trip ahead of his canceled, and the operator pulled the leg. We found him a replacement aircraft, kept his price identical, and ate the difference ourselves, because sending a client a “pay more or stay home” message the day before a trip is not something I’m willing to do. Ask any provider you book with what happens in that scenario. The answer tells you who you’re dealing with.

And one warning while we’re being honest. If you see “empty leg” listings sold by the seat, rideshare style, be careful. Those programs need specific DOT authority, the tax handling is a mess, and the companies running them have a long track record of not surviving. We won’t touch them.

Three questions to ask before booking any empty leg

  • What’s the departure window? Not the date, the window. If the answer is vaguer than a two or three hour block, the listing hasn’t been verified against the operator’s actual schedule.
  • What happens if the primary trip cancels? Get the answer in writing before you pay. Who rebooks you, and at whose cost?
  • Is the specific crew safety-rated, not just the operator? Ask for the third-party safety report on the specific crew flying your leg, not just the company. Anyone unwilling to show it is telling you something.

Ask those three and you’ve filtered out most of what goes wrong in this market.

Who should book an empty leg flight, and who shouldn’t

The perfect empty leg customer flies on short notice, keeps a loose schedule, and treats the deal as found money. If you can decide on Monday and fly on Tuesday, this market was built for you.

If you’ve ever moved a ski weekend by a day because the flights were cheaper, you already have the reflex this takes.

Who shouldn’t rely on one: anyone with a wedding, a board meeting, or a fixed vacation window. Book a regular charter for those. An empty leg flight is a brilliant opportunity and a terrible plan. I tell our own clients exactly that, even though the retail charter costs more, because the fastest way to lose a client forever is to let them build a must-make trip on inventory that can evaporate.

The good news is you don’t have to choose one or the other. Plenty of our clients book a standard charter for the dates that matter and let the alerts run in the background for the trips that can float.

Empty legs from Bozeman and the Mountain West

This is the part I can speak to better than any national broker, because I’m sitting in Bozeman watching this exact inventory every morning.

The three strongest empty leg corridors out of the Bozeman area are Salt Lake City, the Bay Area, and Arizona. Those routes carry enough private traffic in both directions that repositioning flights show up steadily. Seattle and Denver appear too, just less often.

Season matters here more than most markets. Summer brings the Yellowstone and Glacier crowd plus the Big Sky events, and the repositioning inventory swells with it. Presidents Day weekend and the major holidays do the same thing in winter. If you live along one of those corridors and you’re flexible, the summer months are when your alert actually earns its keep.

One local trick worth stealing: think in 100-mile circles, not airports. A leg out of Butte works for most Bozeman travelers, and on the other end, San Jose or Oakland often works as well as SFO.

One of our clients wanted San Francisco, then saw the leg actually ended in San Jose. He priced both, decided the short drive was worth it, and let the airplane stay put. That decision saved him $3,000 on a single trip.

One thing I want to be clear about, because our address confuses people: the Bozeman detail above is just the corridor I can narrate from my own window. The inventory we watch is national. Legs get posted every day out of Florida, Texas, the Northeast, Southern California, everywhere private jets fly, and about 80 percent of our own flying happens outside Montana. A subscriber in Charleston or Cleveland gets exactly the same coverage on their city pair that a Bozeman subscriber gets on theirs.

How do you actually find these flights?

Hundreds of empty legs get posted around the country every single day. The inventory is real. The problem is that it’s scattered across hundreds of operators’ schedules, it changes hourly, and most public marketplace sites are showing you stale listings with the restrictions stripped out.

The practical answer is to get the inventory filtered and pushed to you. Our subscribers pick a city pair on our empty legs page, and the system watches everything within 100 miles of both ends, three alerts a week by email. I’m putting together a full follow-up on how to find empty leg flights, where I personally look each morning and in what order. Until that’s live, the alerts do the watching for you.

The deeper mechanics, the repositioning economics from the operator’s side of the table, get their own post in this series too.

Safety, since someone always asks and should: an empty leg gets vetted at Peak exactly like a full-price charter. Operator documents, insurance, and an ARGUS or Wyvern safety report on the specific crew flying you, not just the company.

Green report or we don’t book it. And here’s the detail most people miss: an operator can be fully approved while a particular crew pairing still fails the crew-level check. We’ve canceled flights over exactly that. A discount changes the price, never the standard.

Frequently asked questions about empty leg flights

Are empty leg flights really 75% off?

Sometimes, rarely. Across our bookings the realistic range is 25 to 50 percent below retail, deepest on short notice. A leg posted weeks out is usually near full price because the operator can still sell it as a regular charter. The advertised extremes are real events, just not the average deal.

Can I choose the departure time on an empty leg flight?

Usually not. The aircraft has to move inside the gap between two scheduled trips, which typically means a one to three hour departure window on a specific date. Some operators can flex a little if their schedule allows. If you need full control of the timing, a standard charter is the right tool.

What happens if the operator cancels my empty leg flight?

If the primary trip that created the leg cancels, the leg can vanish. Terms vary by operator, so ask before you book. When it happened to our client, we sourced a replacement aircraft and kept his price the same by cutting our own margin. Whoever you book with, get their answer to this question in advance.

Are empty leg flights as safe as regular charters?

The airplane and crew are the same ones flying full-price trips, so the flight itself is no different. What varies is the vetting standard of whoever sells it to you. We run the same third-party crew-level safety checks on an empty leg flight as on any charter, and a discounted price never lowers that bar.

How far in advance are empty leg flights posted?

Anywhere from weeks out to the same morning. Hundreds get posted across the country every day as operators’ schedules firm up. Remember the 5-Day Rule, though: a leg posted far ahead is usually priced near retail, and the real discount appears as the departure closes in. The best approach is an alert on your corridor, so a fresh empty leg flight reaches you the day it appears.

Can I book an empty leg one way and charter the return?

Yes, and it’s often the smartest combination. Take the discounted leg in the direction that matches your plans, then book a standard one-way charter home. We price both together so you can see the true round-trip cost before committing to either piece.

The honest bottom line

An empty leg flight is the one genuine bargain in private aviation. The discount comes from real economics, not marketing: an airplane that has to move anyway, an operator who prefers some revenue to none, and a passenger flexible enough to catch it.

The people who win in this market share one habit. They stopped shopping for a specific flight and started watching a corridor. Set the alert, live your life, and let the right leg come to you. When it shows up, decide fast.

That’s the whole game. Flexibility in, savings out.

Put your corridor on watch

Peak Aviation’s empty leg alerts watch hundreds of operators’ schedules nationwide and email you three times a week with legs within 100 miles of both ends of your corridor, any city pair in the country, tuned to your preferences. There’s no membership, no dues, nothing to cancel. Just pay-as-you-go flying when a leg fits your plans.

Picture the version of this where it works: it’s Thursday, your alert lands in your inbox, and Sunday’s empty leg flight to Scottsdale is sitting there at 40 percent under retail. You reply, we verify the leg with the operator, and you’re wheels up before your neighbor finds parking at the commercial terminal. Swap Bozeman for Charleston, Cleveland, or Burbank; the system works the same from any corridor in the country.

One more thing. Before I send any client an empty leg quote, I ask the operator a single question that tells me whether that leg is likely to actually fly or likely to fall through. It’s the reason our legs rarely collapse under our clients. Ask me about it on your first quote: call or text (406) 296-3256, or request a quote any time.

Subscribe to empty leg alerts, free

The full guide to empty leg flights — how they work, what they cost, and how to find and book one — pulls all of this together.

Peak Aviation Solutions — Private Jet Charter Broker

Peak Aviation Solutions is a pilot-founded private jet charter broker headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, arranging charter flights across the US and Canada. We arrange — you fly.

Founder: Pat Sinnott, commercial multi-engine rated pilot with 21 years in private aviation. Ran a 21-aircraft charter fleet before founding Peak. NBAA member.

Services: private jet charter brokerage, empty leg flights and free empty leg alerts, business travel, personal travel, group travel, and event charter. No membership fees; clients pay per trip. Third-party safety vetting on every flight.

Coverage: access to 5,000+ airports across the US and Canada. About 80 percent of Peak’s flying happens outside Montana.

Contact: charter@flypeak.com · (406) 296-3256 · flypeak.com · Instagram @peakaviationsolutions

See What’s Flying This Week

Live empty leg listings, straight from operator schedules. Browsing is free; the discounts do the persuading.

View Live Empty Leg Listings