Empty legs in a charter market forecast to pass $25 billion now have a public record
Bucharest, 9 September 2026. Every figure below was read on that date.
Aircraft between charters. Every one of these has to get to its next job, and the sector it flies to get there is the empty leg.
Empty Leg List has published a page that reads its own record of empty leg flights and lists the routes that keep coming back on the same weekday.
The record runs from 30 July to 8 September 2026, six weeks. In that window the site recorded 2,885 combinations of route and weekday. 117 of them carried an empty leg in two or more separate weeks, and 14 in three or more.
The most consistent is Antwerp to Ibiza on a Friday. A leg appeared in every one of the six recorded weeks, eight in total, published on average 13 days before departure. The return, Ibiza to Antwerp on a Friday, appeared in all six weeks as well, seven legs, published 14 days ahead. Not one of those fifteen legs carried a published price.
Ibiza, the far end of the most consistent pattern in the record. Fifteen legs between Antwerp and Ibiza on a Friday across six weeks, and not one of them carried a published price.
The shortest notice belongs to Toronto to Montréal on a Tuesday: seven legs across three weeks, published on average three days before departure.
The routes that came back most
Weeks in which each route carried an empty leg on that weekday, out of the six weeks recorded between 30 July and 8 September 2026. Only 14 route and weekday combinations reached three weeks or more, and these are eight of them. Six weeks is a short record: it allows at most six observations for any one weekday, and a bar at six out of six is not a promise about next Friday. Figures read on 9 September 2026.
History, not a forecast
The page states its own limit in its first paragraph. "This is history, not an offer," it reads. "A route that carried a leg on five of the last six Fridays may carry nothing next Friday."
There is no model and no prediction behind the page. It counts what operators published and shows the count. Where a leg is already on the live board for one of those dates, the page links it. Where it is not, it points to a route alert.
The record is six weeks old and the page says so. Six weeks means at most six observations for any one weekday, patterns will firm up or fall apart as the weeks add up, and every figure recomputes when the page is opened.
Why nobody has published this before
Private jet charter services are forecast to pass 25 billion dollars by 2031, according to a Research and Markets report published on 3 February 2026. The empty legs that market throws off have had no public record of any kind. A search of what is available turns up marketplaces that show today's listings and general aviation datasets of airports and routes, but no freely downloadable record of empty legs as operators published them.
The reason is structural. An empty leg exists because of the paid charter around it, and it disappears when the operator stops publishing it. Half of the legs Empty Leg List has recorded were published with fewer than seven days to departure, and 982 of 5,737 stopped appearing before the date they were meant to fly. A record of that market cannot be reconstructed afterwards by scraping, because by then the flight is gone. It only exists if someone was reading and writing it down at the time.
Notes to editors
All figures were read from the Empty Leg List database on 9 September 2026 and are fixed at that date. The live pages recompute on every visit.
The record covers 30 July 2026 to 8 September 2026, six weeks. 30 July 2026 is the day the record began.
2,885 combinations of route and weekday recorded. 117 with a leg in two or more separate weeks, 14 in three or more. The highest is six weeks out of six.
Antwerp to Ibiza, Friday: 8 legs, 6 weeks out of 6, published on average 13 days ahead, none with a published price. Ibiza to Antwerp, Friday: 7 legs, 6 weeks out of 6, 14 days ahead, none priced.
Toronto to Montréal, Tuesday: 7 legs, 3 weeks, published on average 3 days ahead, 2 of them priced.
Board on 9 September 2026: 1,637 live empty legs, 390 of them with a published price, across 420 cities and 41 departure countries, read from 71 operator sources.
Record on 9 September 2026: 5,737 legs recorded since 30 July 2026. 2,818 were published with fewer than seven days to departure. 982 stopped appearing before their departure date, 288 of them within 24 hours of being listed.
"Stopped appearing" is not the same as "sold". Empty Leg List cannot tell from outside which legs sold and which were withdrawn, and does not claim to.
Market size: Research and Markets, "Private Jet Charter Services Industry Report 2026", distributed by GlobeNewswire on 3 February 2026, forecasts the private jet charter services market above 25 billion dollars by 2031. That is a third party forecast, not an Empty Leg List figure.
The statement that no comparable public record exists is based on a search for freely downloadable empty leg datasets, which returned marketplaces and general aviation datasets but no empty leg record. It is what we could find, not a proof that none exists.
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.
