How do we know that "thousands" of seats go empty on airliners across the Atlantic every day? Well, there are two methods we use to arrive at this conclusion: deduction, and empirical observation.

DEDUCTION: according to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics (Office of Airline Information), the average "load-factor" -- i.e., the proportion of total available seats occupied on an aircraft -- on all flights reported on by the DOT has never gone higher than 60%! This means that around 40% of the seats went empty -- i.e., unsold to the public. [If you check out that page, focus on the column headed "Over-all revenue load factor %", the ninth column in the table that makes up virtually that whole page.] Since aircraft seating configurations on international routes run between roughly 250 and 500 seats in capacity, this means that on the average there are a little under half of close to 400 seats (or, to state the exact arithmetic mean flight configuration, 375) flying empty on each flight, or just under 200 seats!! Of course, some flights fly full and some flights fly with 300 (or even more) empty seats on them...but these are the rare statistical exceptions. (Since rarely do more than 10-20 Airhitchers elect to try the same flight, it is virtually assured you will get on an airplane when you go to the airport -- assuming that you've managed your departure wisely in terms of the availabilities you learn about during your flight-briefing, and are not, e.g., being "picky", by attempting flights you know to be "iffy", simply because they would take you marginally closer to where you would prefer to be, or fly on a date marginally closer to the date you would prefer to fly on.)

Now: with nearly 200 seats flying empty per flight (on the average), how does this translate into "thousands" per day? Well: how many flights are there across the Atlantic in one day? There are five major U.S. carriers and about a dozen major European carriers flying at least one widebody aircraft in that corridor every day; but then are there are also numerous "minor carriers" doing the same thing. No one knows the exact number, but one can estimate that there must be at least 20, and probably closer to 50, jumbo jet aircraft flying between the U.S. and Europe, in each direction, every single day! And this figure does not even include charter flights! At an average of nearly 200 empty seats per aircraft, this translates into nearly 4000-10000 seats per day flying dead empty.

OBSERVATION: when was the last time you rode on a plane to (or from) Europe (other than when you Airhitched, of course!) that was absolutely 100% full? How often has that happened to you? We of the Airhitch staff are often in airports to assist Airhitchers in their endeavors: and we see flight after flight with the door shutting on empty seats!

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