Empty Legs List
There is no shortage of empty leg pages. There is a shortage of one place to look. Empty Leg List puts the flights charter operators publish into a single index, updated three times a day, with the operator’s own price and no commission on top.
What an empty leg actually is
An empty leg is a one way sector an aircraft flies with nobody on board. A client is flown from London to Nice, and the aircraft still has to get home, or reposition to collect the next charter. That flight happens either way. The fuel, the crew and the handling are already committed.
Because the cost is already sunk, the operator would rather sell the sector at a fraction of a normal charter price than fly it empty. That is the whole mechanism. There is no trick in it and no special access required.
The trade you make is control. You give up the date, and often the exact hour, and in exchange you fly privately for a lot less. If your plans are fixed to the hour, a normal charter quote is the honest answer.
The problem is finding them
Empty legs appear with days of notice, not months, because the operator only knows a sector is empty once the paid flight around it is confirmed. They are published on operator websites, on individual booking pages, sometimes only in a newsletter. By the time an aggregator has copied one across, it may already be sold.
So the practical problem is not understanding empty legs. It is checking forty operator pages before breakfast.
What the index does
The list is rebuilt three times a day from what operators have published. Each row carries the route, the departure date, the aircraft type, the seat count, the estimated flight time, and the price as the operator wrote it. Where an operator publishes no price, the listing says so instead of inventing a number.
You can search it by city, by airport code, or by country. Typing France or United Kingdom returns every flight touching that country, which matters when your plan is a region rather than a specific airport.
There are pages for individual cities, for the corridors that produce the most traffic, and for the aircraft types that keep appearing, from a Citation Mustang up to a Global 6000. Each one shows what is live on it right now rather than a static description.
Prices are the operator’s published figure, for the whole aircraft, not per seat. That distinction gets blurred often enough in this industry to be worth repeating.
What it is not
Empty Leg List is a listing service. It is not a broker, it is not an operator, and it is not a party to any booking. It takes no commission.
An enquiry goes to the operator that published the flight. They confirm availability and the final price with you directly. Nobody adds a margin in the middle, because there is nobody in the middle.
Two things follow from that, and both are worth saying plainly. An empty leg can be sold, cancelled or rescheduled between the last check and your enquiry, because it exists only as a by-product of the paid flight around it. And the final price is whatever the operator says it is, not what a listing said yesterday.
For operators
Listing is free. No fee, no commission, no contract, no exclusivity. An operator sends the sectors, or points at the page where they already publish them, and they appear in the index alongside everyone else’s.
The argument for doing it is simple arithmetic. A sector that flies empty earns nothing. A sector that flies at a third of charter price earns a third of charter price. The only thing standing between the two is somebody seeing it in time.
Operators who want their empty legs listed can write to open@emptylegslist.com.
Who is behind it
Empty Leg List is published by Publishing Office SRL in Romania, the same team behind The Flying Engineer. It grew out of a straightforward observation from running an aviation network for over a decade: the flights exist, the demand exists, and the two rarely meet in time.
The index is at emptylegslist.com. It is free to search, there is nothing to install, and there is no login in the way of the list.
