Flighting is an advertising scheduling strategy where spend runs in concentrated bursts ('flights') separated by deliberate gaps with no advertising. It is the opposite of a continuous (or 'drip') schedule, where spend stays level year-round.
The logic is demand concentration. Flight training searches peak in specific windows — post-holiday New Year resolution enquiry spikes, pre-summer intake periods, post-graduation career switches. A flight school using flighting puts most of its paid budget into those windows and saves the rest of the year for continuous low-level brand and SEO activity. The same pattern applies to charter (peak leisure seasons, corporate fiscal-year-end travel) and MRO (inspection-cycle and pre-buyout season demand).
Flighting suits three conditions: demand that is genuinely seasonal, a product with a long consideration window (so brand awareness built in one flight can convert in a later one), and a budget too small to sustain meaningful continuous presence. If demand is steady year-round, flighting creates awareness gaps that competitors fill cheaply.
In aviation marketing the practical failure mode is not choosing flighting — it is switching it off everywhere at once. Operators who pause paid search entirely in off-periods also pause the data collection and auction learnings that make the next flight efficient. The stronger pattern is a continuous always-on layer (brand search, retargeting) plus flighted bursts (generic and competitor-term pushes) aligned to the operation's real enrollment and booking windows.