I don't know if that's awesome or terrible.

I can totally see the appeal of flying in an almost empty 747, but at least according to this source[1] that makes a truly shocking 1MPG between the five of you. I can't help thinking the world would be a bit better off if they'd just apologised, and put you on the next flight.

[1] http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/que...

I think the hundreds of passengers waiting the board the aircraft at where ever that flight was going might have a problem with that.

Sometimes the sizes of the passenger streams between two destinations aren't perfectly in balance. This is most clearly visible on shuttle services between a small and a large city - busy going to the large city in the morning and to the small city in the evening, and semi empty in the opposite directions.

Also seasonal flights - the first flight of the season to depart the destination (and the last to arrive) will often be pretty lightly loaded.

When that situation arises, you will need to reposition a less-than-full aircraft, otherwise your operations obviously falls apart. The GP clearly experienced an extreme case of this, but most likely that aircraft was being filled up at its next departure, and so needed to be there.

This is obviously expensive for airlines, so they try all they can to fill up these flights - which explains that the cheapest tickets are often on times that will be slightly odd or inconvenient, at least to business travellers.

My roommate is a flight attendant - he informed me of term for transporting passenger-less commercial planes: "ferrying".

The flight attendant told me the plane was fully booked on the next trip, it was replacing one that had to be taken in for maintenance at my destination or something along those lines (Its been a while, I don't remember the details), so it was either flying it empty or flying with us on it.

If airlines could do so, they would. It’s very expensive to fly an empty plane. But those planes are on a tight and inflexible schedule - they’d be flying even if no one boarded the plane at all.

I've had that on a few flights. Not quite as empty as you describe, but enough room where most in coach had 2-3 seats they could lay down in. Most often these have happened when taking vacations/business trips in the off season. Various places in Europe during the winter for example.

that is crazy ! I find that so hard to believe, it just seems so crazy. Maybe a chunk of the seats were sold but something happened like, airport shuttle buses broke down or got stuck and everyone missed the flight. Cringeworthy for the airline to have to fly that flight anyways heh

From the sound of it, it was going out to replace a plane that needed maintenance. Which is a thing that happens; just a couple weeks ago, IIRC, Delta had to pull a 747 out of a "boneyard" storage facility and fly it to Seoul to replace one that took a bunch of damage (mostly hailstones) from a thunderstorm.

Also, schedules are built around keeping the plane in the air as much of the time as possible, which sometimes means there's a mostly-empty "positioning" flight to get a plane to where it needs to be to carry a full load. I know with US Airways, for example, you can sometimes randomly snag a seat on a widebody international plane between Philadelphia and Charlotte (usually coming out of maintenance and onto transatlantic service, or switching which hub the plane operates from), and on Delta you can occasionally fly a 747 domestically between Atlanta and Detroit (to get the 747 in position to fly from Detroit to destinations in Asia).

AA does this too and they have a schedule: https://www.aacargo.com/downloads/schedule/widebody_USA_dome...

I wanted to try first class on the 777 when it first came out, so I just connected in DFW for a PHX-ORD trip, and did the DFW-ORD segment on a 777.

As it turns out, domestic flights are GREAT in big aircraft. (Though I do like the smaller A321Ts too. International-class accommodations, but a really small feeling, like a private plane.)

Yeah, I was pretty confused myself at the time. We started to taxi with an empty plane and I asked a flight attendant wtf was going on and if the plane was supposed to be moving. It was nice though, I put up all the arm rests in one of the rows of middle seats and laid down for a nap.

I heard that airlines partner with companies like DHL and FedEx, and in cases like this they load more shipment packages in the storage space. That way they'll compensate the costs.