Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? contestant fails £1,000 question — can you get it right?

Anyone who’s watched Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? will be familiar with its habit of easing contestants into the game gently.

The long-running show gives those in the hot seat the chance to walk away with up to £1,000,000 by answering a series of general knowledge questions, which get progressively harder as the rounds go on.

Once a contestant passes the £1,000 mark on the ladder, that is the minimum amount of money they can leave with — and given the questions up to that point are generally very easy, it’s rare to make an empty-handed exit from the show.

But that doesn’t mean it never happens, as viewers found out in the most recent edition of the show, which aired on Sunday night.

Mechanical engineer William Ho, from Leeds, had the chance to play for the coveted one million quid after acing the fastest finger first round, and for a while everything was going smoothly.

Until he was faced with the £1,000 question, which was this: What term is used for a scheduled flight regularly flown with a near-empty plane, in order to preserve a landing slot?’

The possible answers were A) Red-eye flight, B) Ghost flight, C) Maiden flight or D) Charter flight — and William quickly selected A, saying that red-eye flights happen at night.

Except it was the wrong answer.

Even William realised his mistake, shouting ‘Wait!’ before putting his head in his hands.

But it was too late, as host Jeremy Clarkson told him: ‘I’m really sorry, we have to take the final answer, and that’s wrong.’

The error meant that William became one of only a select handful of contestants to leave the show with no money at all.

So, what is the correct answer – and would you have got it? The correct answer is B) Ghost flight.

The term is used in commercial aviation to describe a flight operated by an airline on a regularly scheduled route, which contains less than 10% of the craft’s total capacity.

While previously considered to be a rare occurrence, they became more frequent in the early 2020s in the wake of the pandemic as flights were cancelled and passenger numbers were reduced, forcing airlines to increase the numbers of empty or virtually empty flights to maintain airport slots.

The Guardian revealed that almost 15,000 ‘ghost flights’ departed the UK between March 2020 and September 2021.

Viewers were quick to take to social media as the show aired, with many sympathising with William.

‘Bless him, looked like he was going to cry,’ one person commented, while another added: ‘I bet that lad on who wants to be a millionaire wishes he was on a ghost flight out that studio.’

Others, meanwhile, suggested they might also have left without a penny if faced with that question. One person wrote: ‘Genuinely never heard of ghost flight – I might have got that wrong myself.’

While William may not have become a millionaire, or even a grand richer, he can console himself with the knowledge that he is in good company — specifically that of Harry Redknapp.

The iconic football manager also joined the ranks of those who left the show empty-handed back in 2021 when he failed to correctly answer a question on who played John Rambo in five action films, answering Bruce Willis instead of Sylvester Stallone.

Redknapp, who had been on the show to win money for his chosen charity The Dream Factory, later pledged to donate £5,000 of his own cash to make up for winning nothing.