Nearly empty flights
 

I am reticent to open a new thread, but as best as I can tell, the only thread for Delta about nearly empty flights dates back to 2010. Mods, feel free to move this post if there's a better place for it. Anyway:

My friend and her companion are flying on DL 1549 this morning (November 3, 2025), SEA-ANC. She reported there are only 18 passengers on the flight, on an A220-300, which has 130 seats (75 main + 43 Delta Comfort + 12 F). So, it's flying with 14% of seats occupied. She is gold medallion and the upgrade to F cleared for both her and her companion at the 72-hour mark.

It might be interesting to keep a thread of reports of very empty flights.

Personally, my most recent experience with an unusually light passenger load was a Delta flight from LHR-SEA about a year ago, which was perhaps 25-30% of capacity. I gave up my Premium Select seat to head to the back and take an entirely empty block of 4 seats in the middle section and spread out for a nice extended nap in what you might call "cheap man's business class". I asked the flight attendant if it was OK for me to move back and she said it was fine, and "enjoy".

These sort of experiences were far more common in the 1990s, but in my experience are exceptionally rare now on mainline flights . . .though they still happen fairly regularly on connection carrier flights.

March 2020 was pretty wild. Had several flights where I was the only passenger.

I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from one flight to a fairly off season city. Most of the flights I see are completely packed.

Yeah COVID is kind of an exceptional time. I flew in late June, 2020, when we had come out of the worst of COVID, but Delta was still blocking seats and my planes were about 30-40% full as I recall.

Just FYI I am not "drawing any conclusions". Just documenting one flight. I happen to think the phenomenon of a very empty flight is intrinsically interesting.

I was on the first ORD-MSP flight after 9/11. There were rolling delays and cancellations all day. Passenger load on a DC-9 was about 25-30, almost all grim-faced business travelers flying alone after spending time in the lounge.

When DL first started moving to HND, I was on an evening departure to the USA, DTW IIFC. D1 had one other passenger.

Try the weekend of September 15-16/01 when the airports reopened. Miami airport looked like it was 3am in the middle of the day. No stores were open and my little toiletry bag which included one disposable razor had to be checked.

But back to what I believe was the point of the original post -- I'm curious to hear about flights that folks have taken recently, because they tend to be such outliers (as opposed to during COVID, when they were the norm). In my experience, nearly all Delta flights are completely or very-nearly full; that's a sharp contrast with many foreign-carrier flights I've been on where it's not unusual at all for flights to be half empty. I've always been curious about why such airlines don't replicate or license the dynamic pricing / revenue-management algorithms of the airlines that consistently fly full.

In July-ish 2020 I was the only person in the JFK T4 B skyclub... this was the entirety of the departures board that afternoon:
http://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.flye...af7db7a45.jpeg

Back on topic though - flew MSP-ICN this summer and was one of 4 passengers in D1 (although after standbys cleared the cabin was half full); not the worst thing since my seat recline was broken and they were able to move me to another true window seat

This x100% but its the world we live in. People have one experience and extrapolate it to the entire world. This isnt specific to flights, its everything. Someone will visit a city for 2 days and its cold and say "I hate this city cause its cold and windy" then post it on social media as though that one 48 hour experience is how it always is.

I’ve been on 8 flights in the last 2 weeks- 6 on DL and 2 on WN. The DL flights were all full or nearly full. The WN flights both left with several dozen empty seats.

I took the same early flight a month ago (SFO-SEA-ANC) it wasn't too empty, but C+ was half-occupied after complimentary upgrades. As platinum with AmEx reserve I was upgraded to First 5days before SFO-SEA, and at the gate on SEA-ANC (first in the upgrade list: I assume that diamonds were upgraded days before)

I think there are many different factors contributing to many flights currently being very full, while others not so much. Some of it is obviously load management by airlines. Additionally, however, during Covid, many airlines mothballed or retired aircraft presuming that demand would not rebound as quickly as it did, so had insufficient capacity. Some intentionally brought back capacity only slowly to keep loadings high, but it is not an instantaneous thing to unmothball an aircraft. Then there are/were the engine issues with both Rolls Royce and Pratt and Whitney, and the time it has taken to address them, which have grounded a lot of planes. And finally Boeing's problems with the 737 max and delays with deliveries in general post covid.

Another factor during COVID is that DL initiated a seat blocking policy so that no one was forced to sit next to a stranger and then maintained seat blocks later than other carriers. "Full" tended to mean that about two-thirds of the seats were occupied (depending on aircraft type and the number of passengers who were traveling together). It was nice to sit in FC without a seat mate.