Word.ws English Dictionary

ghost flight

ghost flight noun: an empty or near-empty flight run by an airline to fulfill contractual obligations.

Noun

ghost flight (plural ghost flights)

  1. An empty or near-empty flight run by an airline to fulfill contractual obligations.
    • The ghost flights, defined as those with no passengers or less than 10% of passenger capacity, operated from all 32 airports listed in the data.2022 February 22, Damian Carrington, “Almost 15,000 ‘ghost flights’ have left UK since pandemic began”, in The Guardian
    • Airlines may be denying that they run ghost flights, but they're certainly able to operate them during travel bans: they don't have to cancel flights even if pandemic restrictions mean their passengers can no longer travel.2022 May, Sarah Barrell, “Ghost Flights: Are Empty Planes Haunting Our Skies?”, in National Geographic Traveler, →ISSN, page 143
  2. A flight in which the aircraft continues to fly after incapacitation of the pilots or crew.

Forms of ghost flight

pluralghost flights

Questions about ghost flight

What does ghost flight mean?
Ghost flight means an empty or near-empty flight run by an airline to fulfill contractual obligations.
What part of speech is ghost flight?
Ghost flight is a noun.
What is the plural of ghost flight?
The plural of ghost flight is ghost flights.

Words near ghost flight in the dictionary

  1. ghost flatheads
  2. ghost flatworm
  3. ghost flatworms
  4. ghost fleet
  5. ghost fleets
  6. ghost flight
  7. ghost flights
  8. ghost forest
  9. ghost forests
  10. ghost frog
  11. ghost frogs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ghost flight (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ghost flight.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ghost_flight. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.