Booking obscure charter airlines

[davidjohnson6]

I'd like to book a ride as a passenger on some of Europe's smaller charter airlines as (substantially) a scheduled passenger. I'm looking only for a flight - no accommodation required and I don't want to pay for 7 nights in a hotel either. I'm not limited to a specific route - happy to try to build a trip around the obscure charter airline. I accept bookings must usually be made via the company chartering the aircraft rather than the airline and the legal position can sometimes be slightly uncertain. I also understand that holiday companies find package holidays more profitable than a oneway flight and prioritise accordingly - thus I'm looking mainly, but not exclusively, at cases of scheduled airlines which hire charters to provide additional fleet capacity over the summer.

I know that looking at specific aircraft registrations from airfleets.net combined with flightradar24 can be a starting point to see which routes a charter airline has been paid to fly but this is a somewhat limited tool.

Are there any other ways to identify ways to fly for modest cost on charter airlines in Europe ?

[c52]

In some cases it seems perfectly predictable: for instance, Ryanair chartered four 737s last summer, and I believe they operated the same flights every day all summer. I believe the same is true for Thomas Cook and Monarch, with a weekly pattern. This should become clear a few weeks into the season.

You'd be lucky to get a flight operated by a different machine because the airline's own a/c was unserviceable. I suppose you could go to the airport, tell the airline you've noticed they're using an Ancient Airlines MD80 on an inbound flight, and ask if it's being used for the outbound flight as well, and if they have a spare seat to sell you!

Santa flights are often operated by airlines from the Baltic region.