What is the cheapest regular-priced scheduled flight I can book and fly?

Question

What is the cheapest (regular priced, scheduled) flight anywhere in the world, that I can book and fly?

To be a bit more specific:

• by regular priced I mean: no error fares (Allitalia once had a pricing glitch that even resulted in negative flight prices, they ultimately honored all error fares with a positive price), nor promotional fares (RyanAir once advertised EUR 1 fares in Europe). I am looking for the cheapest regular fare without short-lived discounts. If however there is a permanent discount that can easily be used available, that is fine.
• by scheduled I mean: not a charter flight or anything similar but a flight that operates according to a schedule, be that "once a year", "three times a day at ..." or even obscure things like "on the eve of each soccer world cup"
• by flight I can book I mean: a flight that can be pre-booked reasonably well either online or in place, without suffering too long of a wait, say ca. 3 months of wait time is fine (so I could plan my travels around that) or a flight that has reasonable availability if I step up to the ticket counter at the airport (being able to fly on the next departure or the one after or within a few days if there are plenty)
• by flight that I can fly I mean: no flight in places that it is impossible hard to get a visa/permission for, e.g. for a EU citizen with sufficient funds and a decent immigration history. So no flights to Russian military bases I guess.

I do not care, for the sake of this question, about other criteria, such as the length of the flight, the aircraft flown, the airline, country nor even the safety (as long as the pilot is willing to fly, so am I). If any doubt remains, my criteria, are in spirit similar to those here, i.e. "has a flight number, I can look it up online and book a ticket".

Motivation:
It would be a nice travel anecdote to be able to say "I once was on a flight that cost less than a single french fry at McDo, you could fly too". If combinable with my travel plans I'd be keen on taking such a flight just for the sake of it.
We also have had several similar factoid questions on here, e.g.

• What is the shortest commercial passenger flight (with a flight number) in the world?
• What is the cheapest hostel in the world?
• What is the cheapest available freighter voyage anywhere?
• Shortest A380 route from Frankfurt
• What is the cheapest metro system in the world?

Answer 1

A return flight from Westray to Papa Westray is a mere £21, or £10.50 per leg. It also happens to be the shortest scheduled flight in the world. Prices haven't changed since at least 2013 and tickets are available on-the-spot.

I'm not sure if any other route can beat that price while being just as consistent.

Answer 2

Internal flights within Cuba are heavily subsidised by the Cuban government.

Here is an image I took at Holguin airport of the sales desk for flights to Havana. The flight costs $187MN, which is $6.67CUC or so (the form of Cuban currency that can be converted into other currencies). This works out at £4.46 or €5.33 (about $6 USD).

Answer 3

Turkmenistan heavily subsidizes domestic flights on the state airline. The Turkmen Airlines site does not list domestic fares, but according to this article (undated, alas), the regular fare for Ashgabat-Balkanabad is 38 Turkmen manat (TMT). That's around US$10.80 at official exchange rate (3.5 TMT:1 USD), or under US$9 at the black market rate (4.2 in Jan 2016, probably even weaker now).

Answer 4

AirAsia regularly discounts their flights to next to nothing for a (very) few seats.

For example, KL to Alor Setar on Valentine's Day 2017 for ~$2.45 USD (actual price is in Malaysian ringitts, of course).

They do charge a credit card processing fee for most cards, so it will run you about the cost of a big Mac (in Canada or the US).

Answer 5

You could try flying from Warsaw to Wroclaw on Ryanair for $5 round trip (regular fare, not a promotion). Warsaw to Gdansk is priced similarly.

Answer 6

While not giving the cheapest flight in the world it is possible to find the cheapest flight from any given country to anywhere using skyscanner, however, you could go through all countries yourself. To do this you can select select from a country to everywhere, and for the month select "cheapest month".

Completing this for the UK gives from London Stansted to Szczecin (Poland) for £12 (~16 USD) return with Ryanair. When departing on the 22nd of August 2017 and returning on the 23rd of August, other dates where available.

Edit: mts has found flights from WMI to GDN on 15 Sep (Warsaw to Gdansk) for PLN 9 (2 EUR/1.76 GBP)

Answer 7

Wizzair has many flights in Europe under 15€ if you're lucky, depending on demand. Most of the cheapest flights are between a Western and an Eastern European country (for example, Germany and Romania)

One example:

https://wizzair.com/#/booking/select-flight/DTM/CLJ/2016-10-29/null/1/0/0

Depending on the destination and how crowded the day is, it can reach almost down to 10€ or can get above 100€.

Answer 8

What is and isn't a promotion is hard to define, but a Physicists answer would be that if the cost of the ticket is less than the fuel cost of adding ~100kg load (a person plus some cabin baggage) to the flight, then the airline is making a loss on the transaction.

There again, there will be late/early "red-eye" operations which the airline is required to perform to get the plane to the right airport for the start of the next day's operations, and I vaguely recall that a very lightly loaded plane is actually less efficient and therefore it would be worth the airline paying for a few passengers to fly as what a mariner would call ballast.

I was once invited to move up from economy to business class after the plane took off (along with the other four passengers) because the airline would save fuel that way, and we'd snooze more comfortably. (The same almost empty plane did an almost-vertical take-off after leaving the ground halfway along the runway. It went through the cloud-base before the end of the runway).