Super Bowl v. F1: Which attracted the most private jets to Vegas?
While Taylor Swift was probably the most famous celebrity to buzz into Las Vegas in a private jet for Super Bowl Sunday, she wasn’t the only one — and hundreds of planes crowded Southern Nevada skies, according to online flight trackers.
While the Clark County Department of Aviation says it won’t for a few weeks have an official count of private jet flights into and out of the three airports it oversees — Harry Reid International, Henderson Executive and North Las Vegas airports — online flight tracking companies WingX, Flightradar24, FlightAware and Flight Centre Travel Group say hundreds of corporate jets arrived and departed around the weekend.
While all eyes were on Swift and her long flight from Tokyo to the West Coast, flight trackers estimated that 882 private planes flew into Las Vegas before and after the big game, according to a post on the WingX website. That’s fewer than the 931 flights to Phoenix-area airports for last year’s Super Bowl and the nearly 1,000 to the valley for the Formula One race in November.
Clark County officials had said many of the flights to and from Las Vegas would be “drop-and-go” trips in which a pilot flies into the city, drops a passenger off, then goes elsewhere to wait until being called back for a pickup. They estimated around 1,000 flights between Henderson and North Las Vegas.
The county has estimated around 400 parking spaces for private aircraft. Beginning Friday before the game, jets were visible parked wing to wing and nose to nose at Henderson Executive Airport.
Flightradar24 estimated that 525 business jets departed the Las Vegas area after the Super Bowl Sunday and Monday from Reid International, Henderson and North Las Vegas. It said 81 of those flights — around 15 percent — made the one-hour trip to airports in Southern California. Airports in and around New York City saw 33 flights, while the Miami area had 30, Flightradar24 said. San Diego and San Jose, California, rounded out the top five destination cities on private jets after the game.
There also were numerous flights to San Francisco, Kansas City and Des Moines, Iowa.
The aircraft that traveled the furthest after the game was a Bombardier Global Express 7500 jet, which spent 13 hours 20 minutes in the air flying to Ishigaki in southern Japan from Las Vegas.
On the other end, a Dassault Falcon 900EX jet spent just 29 minutes flying from North Las Vegas Airport to Kingman, shaving 90 minutes off the estimated travel time by car.
Those figures square up with data from FlightAware, which tracked an average 135 flights a day arriving Friday, Saturday and Sunday before the game and 189 leaving Monday and Tuesday from Henderson’s airport. FlightAware tracked an average 265 coming in and 340 going out on those same days from North Las Vegas.
Tracking flights into and out of Reid is complicated because there are commercial flights as well as general aviation.
Boulder City Municipal Airport, listed as another aviation alternative, but not under Clark County jurisdiction averaged about 69 flights in and out all five days.
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on X.