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Press release · 9 September 2026
Empty Leg List has read 5,737 empty leg flights since 30 July 2026 and published what they show. The site was built with AI in five weeks. This is what it has found, what it cannot do yet, and how anyone can check.
A charter jet flies where its customer pays it to go. Then it has to get to its next job. That flight happens with nobody on board, and operators sell it cheap.
The problem was never the flights. It was finding them. They sit on dozens of separate operator websites, they appear with days of notice, and they vanish when they sell.
One person and an AI, five weeks, 144 commits. The site reads operator websites three times a day and puts every empty leg in one place, with the operator's own price.
It is a listing service. Not a broker, not an operator, no commission. Enquiries go straight to the operator.
5,737empty leg flights read since 30 July 2026. 1,635 are live right now, and new ones arrive at 133 a day.
At that rate the record passes 20,000 flights by the end of December. Triple the sources and it passes 50,000. Both of those are arithmetic, not a promise.
Some routes come back on the same weekday, week after week.
Antwerp to Ibiza on a Friday appeared in all six recorded weeks. So did the return. Fifteen flights in total, and not one carried a published price.
Across the whole record, 2,885 route and weekday combinations. 117 came back in two or more weeks. Only 14 in three or more.
The routes that came back most
Half of all recorded flights were published less than a week before departure.
982flights stopped appearing before the day they were meant to fly. 288 of those lasted under 24 hours.
Some sold. Some were withdrawn. From the outside we cannot tell which, and we do not claim to.
The obvious next step is to say how likely a route is to repeat. So we built the standard model for it and checked whether the data supports it.
It does not. Across 2,885 combinations the spread between routes measures 0.0020, while random chance alone would produce 0.0240. The gap is negative, which means the model was inventing structure that is not there. It pulled a route seen six weeks out of six down to a 24 per cent chance.
The reason is simple: 2,768 of the 2,885 combinations appeared exactly once. Most empty legs are one-offs, not a weekly service. Six weeks cannot tell the two apart.
So we removed the model. Each route now shows its own rate and how uncertain it is. Antwerp to Ibiza on a Friday reads six out of six, somewhere between 69 and 100 per cent. Toronto to Montréal on a Tuesday reads three out of six, somewhere between 22 and 78 per cent. Wide, and honestly so.
117predictions written down on 9 September 2026 for the week beginning 14 September, before that week began.
Every following Monday the site records what actually happened, then writes down the next set.
After a couple of months that table is a measured hit rate rather than an assumption, and it is public. That is the point at which the word "predicts" will be earned, and not before.
"Predicting empty legs with AI sounds complicated, and like it does not matter much. It does. It helps us make sense of the inventory we list, and it helps travellers plan further ahead."
Radu, founder, Empty Leg ListTwo questions the record is built to answer once it is large enough.
When a new aircraft appears on a route. Every leg carries its aircraft type. A type showing up on a corridor it has never flown is a signal that an operator has moved a jet, and it is visible in the record before it is visible anywhere else.
What happens around a dated event. Aircraft arrive for a show and leave a few days later, and the empty legs cluster on both sides. The first of these pages covers the Monaco Yacht Show, 23 to 26 September 2026, reading the Nice and Cannes airports live.
Private jet charter is forecast to pass 25 billion dollars by 2031, according to a Research and Markets report from 3 February 2026. Its empty legs have had no public record.
Not because it is hard, but because it cannot be done retroactively. A flight that was listed on 12 August and gone by 14 August leaves no trace to scrape. The record only exists if somebody was reading and writing it down at the time.
The live board is published as an open data feed, in JSON and CSV, free and without a key. Every figure in this release can be checked against it. Operator names are not in the feed and are not on the site.
Empty Leg List reads the empty leg flights that charter operators publish on their own websites, three times a day, and puts them in one place with the operator's own price attached. It is a listing service: not a broker, not an operator, not a party to any booking, and it takes no commission. An enquiry goes to the operator that published the flight. Operator names are not published on the site and are not readable through its public data feed.
Empty Leg List is operated by Publishing Office SRL, registered in Romania, VAT RO37770955, part of the group led by The Flying Engineer.
Press contact: open@emptylegslist.com