I thought I had heard (from a friend who is generally very knowledgeable when it comes to aviation) that when there is an unusually large volume of mail, mail bags will sometimes be flown in the passenger cabin of regular airplanes. This would be dedicated flights, probably late at night, with no passengers on board, and the seats are covered up. The bags are strapped in so that they don’t shift during the flight. I was trying to find pictures of this practice online, but couldn’t. Am I making this up, or was he? 
Strapping them into the seats seems like a lot of work when they could toss them into the cargo hold and not worry about them rolling around or ending up under the seats.
Plus, are there even commercial flights with ‘no passengers on board’.
I have to say, though, I don’t know how the USPS transports mail via air. I work across from an airport and see FedEx and UPS planes all the time, but never any USPS (or unmarked) planes. If I had to take a guess, I’d guess they put their air cargo on FedEx planes.
mail security is a big deal.
though if they did would the people get extra peanuts?
I found this on How Stuff Works:
And my only other source for information on this kind of stuff is my mom from when she was shipping manager (among other hats) for a US company that shipped all over the world. She told me there are cargo sections on commercial planes, especially the larger ones, for mail and other commercial cargo other than passenger luggage.
From Wiki:
I’ll say with confidence that no, passenger planes are not flown without passengers. If mail is on a plane, it’s in a dedicated cargo jet (UPS or FedEx), or in the cargo compartment of just about any larger passenger plane along with the people’s luggage.
I see. That certainly explains the lack of any photographic evidence to the contrary. Thanks!
I fly freight and passengers (not at the same time). Anything that doesn’t fit on the regular freight flights either gets put on an additional freight flight to the normal schedule or in the cargo / baggage hold of the next practical passenger flight. Never in my experience has overflow freight been carried on an empty passenger aircraft, that’s not to say it couldn’t be done or hasn’t been done, or isn’t done in other parts of the world, but it is not how we do it.
There are freighters around that are quick change aircraft, that is they can be quickly converted from passenger to freighter by removing the seats which are fitted to pallets. We used to have an aircraft that flew passengers by day and freight by night. This could be where this kind of story came from.
Another possibility is they’re talking about small aircraft which can have their passenger cabin loaded with freight.
Oh yes they do:
I also remember that BA were flying ‘ghosts’ just to keep the airport slots.
That article presents an interesting take on the issue:
To meet Australian and US regulations, empty planes are flown to Heathrow for insecticide treatment. The problem with this obviously silly arrangement lies with Delta, for following the rules, not with the US regulations that won’t allow this treatment on US soil, or perhaps Australia’s, for requiring it.
The airline I work for was started back in the 1920s. When mail was a big thing and airplanes were small things. Back in the far Olden Dayes (1950s & before) mail in the cabin was a commonplace.
When I hired on in the late 80s the pilot general procedures manual included a section on carrying mail in the passenger cabin along with passengers. It addressed segregation, security from tampering/theft, and properly securing the mail bags to ensure they didn’t shift in flight.
I’ve never seen it actually done. And somewhere in the last 15 years or so that section quietly disappeared from our manuals.
Nowadays we do carry massive amounts of mail but always in the cargo hold. And almost none of it is packed in the traditional heavy duffle bags. It’s generally in covered flats or boxes which have been partly sorted already and which stack neatly for handling. I recall seeing the traditional mail bags, but it’s probably been 10 years since my last sighting of a fully filled bag.
When we do see bags now, they’re usually all but empty, holding just a single small box or what’s probably just a handful of envelopes. IOW, it appears they’re used for special handling items only. As I think about it more, I’m not sure those are even US Mail bags versus being company internal mail / freight bags. We also move a lot of internal freight, mostly aircraft parts.
As to empty flights, they happen all the time. We move airplanes from here to there without passengers every day. It’s a small percentage of total flights, probably not more than 0.5%, but it happens. Typical reasons are taking an airplane to or from scheduled overhaul, recovering an airplane after a diversion or major weather event, acceptance of a new aircraft into the fleet, or the retirement of an old one to storage or the wrecking yard.
I’ve never personally seen “phantom flights” for the purposes described in the article linked above, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.
And IMO that article takes a pretty strident tone to what amounts to doing whatever economically nonsensical thing it takes to comply with the thicket of illogical and overlapping government regulations collectively created by dozens of countries. I see the insecticide thing as really no different from having to take your car to two separate facilities for, say, annual safety and annual smog inspections. Sure it’s wasteful to drive between them and you’d rather there was a one-stop shop. But cars are mobile, so going to two places isn’t a big deal.
The idea of holding on to slots using ferry flights or faking stats using actors is reprehensible, and contrary to public policy. But again these are ultimately a matter of unpleasant side effects of situations where government-mandated limited supply runs into free enterprise all-but -unlimited demand. Silliness almost always exists at those kinds of interfaces anyplace in society.
Another common & systematic cause of passengerless flying is “proving flights” for new aircraft types. All this happens long after the manufacturer and government authorities have completed all the testing and service experience flights needed to grant the aircraft type a certificate to be sold & operated by airlines.
When a new fleet type is introduced to a carrier, it’s typical to fly it for a couple weeks on the routes it’ll first be operating on with just pilots. This lets the ground teams at each station practice parking, pushing back, loading, unloading, fueling, repairing, etc. It also lets us debug issues with parking areas, choke points on the airports, etc. The larger and/or newer the aircraft the more ways there are for this to go wrong. e.g. the first A380 operators were debugging not only their own carrier’s procedures & facility modifications, but also those of ATC & the airports.
After a couple weeks we start carrying flight attendants & they get involved with gate agents, together rehearsing their processes for boarding & deboarding. Finally after a month or so total we start doing it for real with live passenger loads.
Adding subsequent cities as a new fleet grows is simpler since we can send workers from the new cities to train for a few days at the existing cities alongside already-experienced folks in their role. But there’s typically still a rehearsal flight or two to each new city.
Wow, thank you very much for the inside scoop, guys!
I was stationed for a year on a small island in the Caribbean. We had a logistics flight with food and stuff every 2 weeks and mail came and went on that. For the off weeks, we had a deal with the tourist hotel on the island. They flew in and out 2 dozen guests a week and we contracted with them to bring and take in a mail bag.
This is going back a few decades, but I can recall being on a flight from a small Wisconsin town to Chicago’s O’Hare, and we made an intermediate stop in Manitowoc. Well, not really a stop; it was against regulations at the time to let passengers off in Manitowoc, because it would have been competition with other airlines (= illegal), but the pilot taxied up to the terminal, tossed out a bag of mail while he was still rolling, then took off.
I can verify this because the pilot told us what he would be doing in advance and I watched the action thru the passage between the cockpit and the cabin, open at the time. Ah, how things have changed!
In '69, we not only had mail bags at the back of the only air service into the Australian Territory of Papua, we had live pigs as well.
I worked in cargo for a regional airline years ago. We used to drop mail off with the rest of the cargo and it went in the cargo hold. We did however, occasionally drive up to the plane and hand the flight attendant a cooler with a live organ in it for transplant right before doors up. My stepson has an insulated lunch bag mocked up as a live organ cooler, most definitely inspired by the real thing.
Here’s a picture I snapped of a much more boring way for passenger planes to carry mail, in the cargo hold (and no bags, just boxes):
