Guide
If you have searched for deadhead flights and landed on pages about empty legs, you were not sent to the wrong place. They are the same flight. Deadhead is the older word and the one American crews use; empty leg is what the operators write on their websites. This page explains the term and then does the useful thing, which is point you at the deadheads on our board right now.
Updated . Board figures from September 2026. The live list on the home page is live.
In aviation, to deadhead is to move without paying passengers. An airline crew member deadheads when they fly as a passenger to reach the aircraft they will work. A charter aircraft deadheads when it flies a sector with nobody in the cabin: out to collect a client, home after dropping one off, or across to a base where the next booking starts. The operator has already committed to that flight. The fuel, the crew and the landing fees are spent whether the cabin is full or not.
Charter operators call that sector an empty leg, a positioning flight or a repositioning flight. Brokers in the United States often say deadhead. Same aircraft, same date, same empty cabin. When an operator publishes it for sale, at a price below what the same sector would cost as a fresh charter, it is what this whole site lists.
Private jets do not run on a schedule. They go where the client wants and then they have to get back, or get to the next client. Unless the next booking starts exactly where the last one ended, there is a gap, and the aircraft flies that gap empty. A busy operator with a dozen aircraft produces gaps every day.
We log a few thousand of these a month. In the thirty days to early September 2026 it was 3,052 new legs, all published by the operators that fly them. Our board holds around 1,100 upcoming deadheads at any moment, from a nine seat Citation between Toulon and Nancy to a Falcon 8X across the Atlantic.
Three things, and they are the same three that make an empty leg what it is. The operator sets the route, the date and the aircraft: you fit into a flight that already exists. It is one way, with no return and no such thing as a return seat, which we measured: of the upcoming legs on our board, only 208 in 1,097 have anything at all listed going back the other way inside the following week, and those are separate flights that can sell on their own. And it can disappear. We have watched 622 legs vanish before their departure date, half of them inside 4.5 days of appearing.
The price reflects all three. Where an operator publishes a figure, it is for the whole aircraft, and it is usually well under a fresh charter on the same sector. Where they publish none, the card says price on enquiry and you ask. How those figures come out across the board, by aircraft type and per seat, is in how much an empty leg private jet costs.
Search the live list by departure, destination or date, or start from a place: every city and country on the board has a page with its own live list. If nothing fits today, set a route alert. Close to half of the legs we record appear inside the final week before they fly, so the deadhead you want is more likely to be published next Tuesday than to be sitting there now.
When you find one, the enquiry goes straight to the operator that flies it. We are a listing service, not a broker: no commission, no markup, and the operator quotes you directly.
Yes. Deadhead is the crew and broker word, empty leg is what operators write on their websites. Both describe a private aircraft flying a sector with nobody in the cabin, sold at a discount because the operator has to make the flight anyway.
Deadhead flights are only one way. The aircraft is repositioning and where it goes next is the operator's business. On our board only 208 of 1,097 upcoming legs have any flight listed in the opposite direction within the following week, and those are separate flights.
Where operators publish a price, the median empty leg in euros on our board is 5,400 for the whole aircraft, or 622 a seat divided by the seats listed. Most American legs carry no published price at all: 24 of 677 on our United States board.