Plane Conversations

Growing up in the southern United States, I learned a whole lot of sayings and idioms that brought humor and spice to the conversations around the dinner table. When I was eating more than I could possibly hold, my grandmother would tell me that I had a “hollow leg”. In the charter business, you’ll often hear us refer to an “empty leg,” but it has a completely different meaning from my grandmother’s phrase.

In the business of providing private jet transportation, we often find ourselves flying an aircraft with no passengers on board.  We’re either on the way to pick passengers up or returning  after dropping them off.  Each take-off and landing constitutes a flight segment or “leg”. Those with no passengers on board  are called “empty legs.”  Sometimes you will hear these legs referred to as “deadheads,” or “one-ways.”  They are all pretty much the same thing, although sometimes charter brokers will make marketing distinctions between the terms. 

Due to the nature of what we do – flights to out of the way airports, different destinations every day, and different times of departure - we seldom run the same trip twice.

Two situations create what we call “empty legs” or flight segments. We may be asked by a customer to go to Denver, for example, to pick up  passengers and drop them off at Memphis.  Our aircraft that best fits the mission is not located at either of those cities, so our starting point might be at Knoxville, where the aircraft is based.  In this case, we end up with two empty legs - Knoxville to Denver, Memphis to Knoxville. The more common situation that creates an empty leg is the drop-off and pickup trip. A client needs to be taken from our home base to another city, where they stay for seven days and then return. It is more cost-effective for us to drop them off, return the aircraft and crew to home base, and then pick them up seven days later than it is to leave the aircraft and pilots at their destination.  This creates two empty legs: the retun to home base on day one and the flight to pick them up on day seven. 

This seems inefficient and, in reality, it is. The problem in our industry has been how to reduce the empty legs created by these scenarios. When I first started (before email and the internet) the only way to solve the problem was to get on the phone and speak to anyone who might have an interest in paying to be on those empty legs. That didn’t work too well and, consequently, empty legs remained empty.  With the advent of the fax machine we started sending blast faxes to anyone and everyone who might be interested in those empty legs, but that, too, was ineffective. Today, with the means to reach vast audiences quickly through the power of the internet, whole businesses have been developed, the sole purpose of which is to match the availability of an empty leg with the  demand that must surely be out there to fill some of those empty seats. Much has been done, but as an industry, we are still not even scratching the surface of the opportunity.

With the explosion of social media, we can expect innovation in how our industry lets you know about those empty legs and, more importantly, how they are priced. Even better, what if travelers could talk to each other about where and when they want to go somewhere, then buy a matching empty leg split the costs.  How cool would it be to fly on a private jet for the same price  you might pay for a walk-up fare on scheduled airlines (mass transit)?  That;s the best part about empty legs: they’re cheap.  

Having hopped a ride on some of those empty legs I can tell you from experience it is pretty cool.

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