Why a positioning flight is on your quote

What is a positioning flight?

Charter aircraft do not wait at your local airport hoping you will call. They finish somebody else's trip somewhere else, or they sit at a home base that may be several countries away. Before your flight can happen, the aircraft has to fly to you empty. After it drops you, it has to leave again — to its base, or to wherever its next booking starts.

Those two empty legs are the positioning flights, sometimes called ferry legs. They are ordinary flying: fuel, crew duty hours, landing fees, airframe hours. Somebody pays for them, and on a one-way charter that somebody is usually you.

What does positioning cost?

Roughly the same per hour as the flight you are on, because the aircraft costs the same to operate empty as full. Applying the published European rate bands and the standard 20–40% trip overhead used throughout our cost guide, one hour of positioning works out at:

Read that against a short sector and the implication is uncomfortable but useful. If your flight is 55 minutes and the nearest suitable aircraft is 90 minutes away, you are paying for more empty flying than occupied flying. That is not a broker inflating a quote; it is the actual shape of the trip.

Why two quotes for the same route differ so much

People reasonably assume that the same route in the same class should cost roughly the same everywhere. It does not, and positioning is usually why. One broker has found an aircraft finishing a trip 20 minutes away; another is quoting one that has to cross Europe to reach you.

This is also why a quote can change between Tuesday and Thursday without anything sinister happening. Aircraft move. The cheap option on Tuesday was cheap because of where it happened to be, and by Thursday it is somewhere else.

Three ways to pay less positioning

• Be flexible about the departure airport. If an aircraft is sitting at Rotterdam and you insist on Schiphol, you pay for a short repositioning hop plus two sets of fees. Our comparison of Schiphol and Rotterdam shows how little you lose in the air by taking the aircraft where it already is.
• Be flexible about timing. Departing a few hours later can let an aircraft finish a trip nearby rather than fly in specially. This is the cheapest flexibility you can offer, and the one people forget.
• Book the return with the same aircraft. An aircraft that waits for you may cost less than two one-way trips that each carry their own positioning. Waiting time is charged, but usually at a much lower rate than flying — the return leg guide works through the crossover.

There is a fourth option that removes positioning entirely: take somebody else's. That is exactly what an empty leg is — a positioning flight sold to whoever happens to want that route on that day, at a price set by how close departure is and how many others want it.

What to ask before you accept a quote

Two questions tell you most of what you need. Where is the aircraft coming from, and how long are the positioning legs? The answers turn an opaque number into something you can act on. If positioning is a large share of the quote, flexibility on airport or timing will move the price. If it is small, the quote is close to the floor for that trip and haggling will not help.

When you request a quote from us, we will tell you where the aircraft is coming from. It is not commercially sensitive and it is often the item you have the most control over.

When positioning is unavoidable

Sometimes it simply is. A one-way trip to a destination with no business aviation traffic means the aircraft flies home empty, and no amount of flexibility changes that. Early departures from quiet fields, trips during peak weeks when everything suitable is already committed, and unusual aircraft requirements all push the same way. In those cases the honest answer is that the trip costs what it costs, and the useful conversation is about whether a different class or a different airport changes the arithmetic.