Empty legs, honestly.

Aircraft do not live where trips start. When one flies a client to Aspen on Friday and is needed in Dallas on Sunday, Saturday's positioning flight happens whether anyone is on board or not. Selling a seat or the whole cabin on that leg recovers cost the operator has already committed to.

What the discount really is

Genuine empty legs commonly sell at a meaningful discount to a full charter of the same aircraft — the operator is recovering a sunk cost, not pricing a trip. But the headline percentages in advertising usually compare against the wrong baseline. The honest comparison is against what that same aircraft would have cost you as a normal charter on that route, on that day.

The conditions nobody puts in the banner

• The route is fixed. It goes where the aircraft has to be.
• The timing is fixed, then it moves. If the originating client shifts by four hours, so do you.
• It can vanish. If the original trip is cancelled or the aircraft is re-tasked, the leg disappears — sometimes the day before.
• Rarely round trip. You still need to get home, at full price.
• Aircraft is whatever it is. No cabin choice.

When it makes sense

• Your dates are genuinely flexible and your plans survive a cancellation.
• The leg happens to run on a route you wanted anyway.
• You are one-way by design — repositioning after an event, for example.
• You have a fallback: a commercial ticket you are willing to buy at short notice.

When it does not

• A board meeting, a wedding, a closing. Anything with a hard time.
• Trips where a same-day fallback is expensive or unavailable.
• When the search itself is costing you more in delay than the saving is worth.

How to use them without being burned

• Set an alert instead of searching. Empty legs surface at short notice; watching a page does not help.
• Get the cancellation terms in writing — specifically what happens if the originating trip changes.
• Confirm the aircraft can use both your runways. A discounted aircraft that cannot land is not a discount. See why runway beats range.
• Price the full charter first, so you know what you are comparing to.

On this site

Empty legs are exposed through the same engine as everything else — including through the MCP server, where list_empty_legs returns contracted repositioning legs with the discount stated against the equivalent full charter, so an assistant can compare them properly rather than repeating a headline percentage.