Now's the time to fly for empty flights

Plane talk: why just one passenger doesn’t necessarily spell financial ruin for airlines

Monarch sadly went bust earlier this month after failing to make hay while the summer sun shone, because of ferocious competition between the UK and Spain. And as you may have read, Karon Grieve from Ayrshire this week found herself the only passenger on a Jet2 flight from Glasgow to Heraklion in Crete. She had paid just £46 for the 2,000 mile flight, and had a choice of 189 seats as well as the attention of four members of cabin crew.

Does this phenomenon signal that budget airlines are in more trouble than we thought? Happily not. While Grieve’s private jet experience is unusual, dozens of other flights this week will have been flying almost empty to the Mediterranean.

The end of the October, when the clocks go back, is an odd time in aviation. The summer schedules officially end this weekend, and route networks change dramatically with the onset of winter. The number of flights to Greece will drop from dozens per day to just a handful.

Passengers like Karon Grieve can get out to the sunshine of south-east Europe really cheaply, comfortably and easily. There are many other examples: Ryanair’s final flight of the summer from Leeds-Bradford to Chania in Crete was selling for £42 one-way, and I imagine even at that price there were few takers, because the trip back from Crete to Britain will prove complicated and expensive: three separate flights will be fastest, though there are train and boat options.

Given the complexity, it’s perfectly rational for most people who might want to fly from western Scotland or West Yorkshire to south-eastern Greece to conclude, “I won’t bother.”

That’s potentially a problem for airlines such as Jet2 which like to fly with 90-per-cent-plus of their seats filled, rather than 0.5 per cent as it was on flight LS193 to Crete last Sunday. The loss on the outbound flight will have been perhaps £15,000; But Jet2 isn’t concerned about how much it made on the way out, because it knew it would fill the plane completely and make a fortune on the way back with returning holidaymakers – who probably paid around £50,000 between them.

In fact the charter airlines have been doing the same since the very first Horizon package to Corsica in 1950. Flying “empty legs” at the beginning and end of the season, is perfectly normal. All the budget airlines have done is said: “Well, the plane’s going there anyway, we might as well see if anyone is interested and hope to defray some of the cost.”

If you are desperate for the private jet experience on a no-frills budget, you have missed the chance for 2017. But you can make the converse move next spring when the flights to Greece, Turkey and Croatia start up again. The first outbound departures will be full with high-fare-paying passengers. But if you can get yourself to the Mediterranean in time to return on the first flight of the season, you’re guaranteed a bargain and plenty of room on board

The emptiest plane I have ever experienced, incidentally, was also to Greece: 25 of us on an Olympic Airways jumbo jet from Heathrow to Athens, which worked out at 16 seats per person: an entire 10-across row on a Boeing 747, and half a dozen more seats to spare. But I suspect that had less to do with maximising revenue on the opposite leg than terrible airline management.