The Gwinnett County Airport at Briscoe Field is expecting to receive some 200 extra planes this week as visitors fly in for the Super Bowl, airport director Matt Smith said.
Briscoe Field, located in Lawrenceville, is typically home to recreation and training planes with 4 seats or fewer. This week’s visiting planes are expected to be larger jets. The 6,000-foot landing strip can accommodate all “light general aviation aircraft” and most corporate jets, the largest of which is the Gulfstream V, according to the airport’s website.
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The airport doesn’t track daily flight numbers, but sees about 98,000 takeoffs and landings each year, averaging out to 268 each day, Smith said. This week, 244 additional arrivals and departures are expected and many of those will be larger jets, Smith said.
Airport staff, air traffic controllers and businesses that assist pilots and passengers will have to move quickly to keep people and planes moving on and off the tarmac within a tight schedule.
“It’s faster paced for the airport and the air traffic controllers, as well as the businesses that work there,” Smith said. “They have to deplane everyone, get them to their cars or their limos and then move everything and prepare to do the same process for the next people coming in”
Airport staff — which includes air traffic controllers and "behind the scenes" workers who help with maintenance, repairs and other operations — will also be working extra hours to accommodate the increased number of plane operations, Gwinnett County spokesman Joe Sorenson said.
The increased traffic is not just putting a crunch on time, but also a squeeze on parking space. The airport is closing one of its taxiways to accommodate the visiting jets that will be parked for multiple days surrounding the Super Bowl. The private jets can take up four to five times the space of those smaller planes, Smith said.
The Super Bowl traffic is an “outlier” for the Gwinnett County Airport, Smith said; similar levels were not seen for events like the College Football Playoff National Championship in January 2018. The additional 1,100 aircraft the NFL expects to travel to metro Atlanta are landing at secondary airports from Peachtree-DeKalb Airport in Brookhaven to Athens-Ben Epps airport more than an hour outside the city, Smith said.
Arriving planes are expected to come in a steady stream throughout the week leading up to the big game, but there will be a rush to leave after the game ends, Smith said. Planes will start leaving around midnight Sunday and the last one is expected to depart before dinnertime the next day.
“Everyone will be gone by 5 p.m. Monday,” Smith said.
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