How to find empty leg flights

Where empty legs are actually listed

There is no central exchange. An empty leg is created the moment an operator confirms a one-way trip, and it is that operator who posts it: on their own availability page, in an email to their list, on a broker portal, or nowhere at all. A large charter fleet might publish twenty a day; a two-aircraft operator might publish one a month. That is why the empty leg you want is rarely on the site you happen to be looking at.

Broadly, legs surface in four places. Operator websites, usually a page called Empty Legs or Availability, refreshed whenever the schedule changes. Operator email blasts, which go out to whoever signed up, often the same morning the leg is created. Broker sites, which mostly re-list a slice of the above with the operator's name removed so you have to ask them. And aggregators like EmpTleg, which collect the operator listings into one search and hand you the operator directly.

Why most empty leg searches come up empty

The usual search is exact: this airport, that airport, this date. Empty legs almost never match an exact search, because the aircraft is going where its last passenger sent it, on the day that passenger chose. If you search Teterboro to Palm Beach on the 14th, you are asking for one aircraft, on one day, out of one field, and the leg that would have worked left White Plains on the 13th.

The people who fly empty legs regularly search differently. They search a region, not an airport. They search a window, not a date. And they search both directions, because a leg that lands near them is worth as much as one that departs near them.

The four settings that find the legs everyone misses

• Departure radius. Set 100 to 250 nautical miles. A jet repositioning out of a field an hour's drive away costs you exactly the same as one from your home airport, and on any given day the cheaper flight is as likely to be at the quieter field. This one setting roughly triples what you see.
• Arrival radius. Widen it further than feels natural. An aircraft repositioning to a field sixty miles from where you are going is still going your way, and operators will often extend the leg to your real destination for far less than a full charter, because to them it is a short addition to a flight already being made.
• Date window. Plus or minus 10 days is the default on EmpTleg for a reason. Legs are created by other people's plans. If you can move your trip to the aircraft's day, you get the aircraft's price.
• Aircraft category, not model. Filter by light, midsize, super-midsize, heavy or ultra-long-range, and let the operator tell you the exact aircraft on the quote. Searching for one specific type throws away most of the inventory for no benefit.

Set an alert instead of searching

Most empty legs are booked within hours of posting, and the best routes (New York to Florida on a Sunday, Los Angeles to Las Vegas, anything into a ski town on a Thursday) go fastest. Checking a website twice a day cannot keep up with that. A saved route with an alert can: EmpTleg re-checks every operator several times a day and emails you the moment a matching leg appears, with the operator's contact on it. Alerts are part of a subscription; the search itself is free.

What to do when you find one

Contact the operator directly and quickly, with your passenger count, your real destination if it differs from the listed one, and whether you can move a day either way. Serious, complete inquiries get answered first. Expect an entire aircraft, one way, on roughly the operator's schedule, and expect the price to be a fraction of a charter but never the price of an airline seat. What empty legs cost, and why the range is so wide, is its own guide.