One in Four Empty Legs Is a Midsize Jet: What Actually Flies Empty

Ask someone to picture a private jet and they will describe a heavy or ultra-long-range cabin: the vast cabin from the brochures. Ask the empty leg board what actually flies empty and it gives a very different answer. We mapped unique empty legs on the SkyAccess marketplace, counting each leg once, across departures from August 27, 2025 to August 27, 2026: 453,778 in total, categorized by aircraft type. One in four is a midsize jet, and the big cabins people imagine are under a fifth of the board.

The key numbers

• SkyAccess marketplace data for departures from August 27, 2025 to August 27, 2026 (deduplicated October 1, 2026): 453,778 unique empty legs total; 453,486 mapped to an aircraft category.
• One in four empty legs is a midsize jet: 111,091 legs, 24.5 percent of the board.
• The workhorse middle dominates. Light, midsize, and super-midsize jets together account for 298,136 legs, 65.7 percent of everything on the board.
• Turboprops outnumber ultra-long-range jets: 43,801 turboprop legs against 28,745 ultra-long-range legs.
• Helicopters logged 21 legs. In an entire year. Across the whole marketplace.

The full board, by category

Here is every category on the SkyAccess marketplace for the trailing twelve months, ranked by count.

Aircraft category	Empty leg count	Share of board
Midsize jet	111,091	24.5%
Light jet	101,966	22.5%
Super-midsize jet	85,079	18.7%
Heavy jet	53,670	11.8%
Turboprop	43,801	9.7%
Ultra-long-range jet	28,745	6.3%
Very light jet	20,546	4.5%
Airliner/bizliner	6,213	1.4%
Piston	2,354	0.5%
Helicopter	21	0.005%

A few things jump out. Turboprops, which rarely feature in anyone’s mental image of private aviation, put more legs on the board than ultra-long-range jets: 43,801 against 28,745. Heavy and ultra-long-range jets combined, the cabins that define the category in popular imagination, add up to 18.2 percent of the board. And helicopters are a rounding error: 21 legs across a full year.

The workhorse middle

The story of the empty leg board is the middle of the size range. Midsize jets (24.5 percent), light jets (22.5 percent), and super-midsize jets (18.7 percent) together account for 298,136 legs, 65.7 percent of everything on the board over the trailing twelve months.

The mechanism is straightforward: empty legs are the charter fleet in motion, seen from the repositioning side. An empty leg exists because an aircraft flew a paying trip one way and needs to get somewhere else, so the mix of aircraft flying empty mirrors the mix of aircraft flying charter. Light and midsize jets do the short regional round trips that dominate charter flying, which means they generate the repositioning flights that dominate the empty leg board too. Two out of three empty legs come from this workhorse middle because that is where the flying happens.

The speed of the board, by cabin size

Category also shapes how much warning you get. Our published analysis of when empty leg flights appear on the board found that super-midsize jets have the shortest median lead time at 2.8 days between listing and departure, with midsize jets at 2.9 days and light jets at 3.3 days. Ultra-long-range jets give the most notice, at a median of 4.0 days.

Put the two datasets together and the picture sharpens: the categories that dominate the board are also the ones that move through it fastest. The super-midsize segment, nearly a fifth of all legs, turns over in under three days at the median. If you are watching for a specific leg in the workhorse middle, the window between appearance and departure is short.

What this means if you are booking

Set your expectations to the data, not the stock photo. If you go looking for an empty leg, what you will realistically find is a midsize, light, or super-midsize jet: two out of three legs sit in that band. Heavy and ultra-long-range cabins do appear, 82,415 between them over the year, but holding out exclusively for a big cabin means ignoring most of the board. Flexibility on cabin class is the single biggest lever you control: the workhorse middle alone offers more than three and a half times the inventory of heavy and ultra-long-range jets combined (65.7 percent versus 18.2 percent).

Three practical moves follow. First, set alerts on the live empty leg board rather than checking manually, because the median leg in the dominant categories is gone within about three days of appearing. Second, time your search: our data on the best day for empty leg flights shows the board has a weekly rhythm worth planning around. Third, watch the broader market pulse in our monthly Empty Leg Index, which tracks how the board is shifting month to month.

Methodology

This analysis covers departure dates from August 27, 2025 to August 27, 2026 on the SkyAccess marketplace, excluding deleted records. After deduplication, retaining only one record per unique leg, the count stands at 453,778. Data was pulled on September 3, 2026 and deduplicated on October 1, 2026 to count each unique leg once. All counts refer to SkyAccess marketplace data, not industry-wide activity.

Categories come from each leg’s aircraft model record, which is populated on effectively every leg: 453,486 of 453,778 mapped to a category. Readers of our lead-time analysis may recall that it reported category medians for 67.5 percent of its dataset; that analysis attributed category through the tail-assigned aircraft record, which roughly two-thirds of legs carry, while the model-level mapping used here covers effectively all legs. The category shares in this piece are therefore the more complete view of the board’s composition.

This is a single-window snapshot of the trailing twelve months. No cross-period comparisons are made. This piece makes no claims about pricing, aircraft specifications, or fleet sizes; it describes composition only. This story is part of SkyAccess Data & Research.

Updated October 1, 2026: counts now count each unique leg once (duplicate listing copies removed).

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SkyAccess is a live private jet and empty leg marketplace at skyaccess.com, listing 5,000+ live empty leg flights from a network of 900+ certified charter operators. This story is part of SkyAccess Data & Research.