When the final whistle blew on Super Bowl LX, the Seattle Seahawks stood as winners. In the hours after the sports extravaganza, thousands of spectators returned to their homes from Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, using basic terrestrial means. Others, meanwhile, zoomed away from the Super Bowl in private jets.
“Let’s take the private jet to the Super Bowl, honey”
We narrowed our set of departure airports to the “big three” (SFO, OAK and SJC) and threw in two private jet friendly alternatives to boot—Livermore (LVK) and Hayward (HWD). Between 03:00-10:00 UTC on February 9th (7:00 PM Saturday – 2:00 AM Sunday PST), 136 business jets departed from these five Bay Area airports. On the Sunday before that? Just 11.
That’s a 1,136% increase. Let that sink in for a while.
| Airport | Normal Sunday* | Super Bowl Sunday | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oakland (OAK) | 2 jets | 52 jets | +2,500% |
| San Jose (SJC) | 6 jets | 43 jets | +617% |
| San Francisco (SFO) | 3 jets | 19 jets | +533% |
| Livermore (LVK) | 0 jets | 14 jets | N/A |
| Hayward (HWD) | 0 jets | 8 jets | N/A |
*February 2nd to be exact. If this was your birthday, then we are sorry—of course it wasn’t a “Normal Sunday”.
Oakland claims the crown
For a few hours, Oakland International became the primary business aviation hub, handling 52 jets—38% of all departures. Why Oakland? Well, it’s a solid choice for business aviation as it typically would offer less commercial congestion, has great FBO facilities, and is located a relatively pain-free 40-odd minute drive from the stadium where the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots clashed.
We can only speculate why San Jose Mineta International Airport didn’t come in as number one. Situated a ten minute drive from the Levi’s Stadium, it probably was the preferred choice by time sensitive travellers. We assume that it simply was operating at its limits, handling 43 bizjet departures (32%) during our chosen time period.
Livermore Municipal Airport, which typically sees zero business jet departures on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings, handled 14 jets. Hayward Executive Airport jumped from zero to 8 jets. This complete saturation of normal business aviation capacity obviously forced operators to use every available facility in the region.
Private jets of the Super Bowl
The exodus featured a diverse mix of aircraft. Everything from Bombardier Global 7500 and Gulfstream G650 heavy-ish business jets, to somewhat more nimble aircraft like members of the Bombardier Challenger family, various Cessna Citation’s and Embraer Phenom 300´s and 100´s.
The vast majority of flights were conducted by private operators (93 flights), while NetJets (EJA) served up 21 flights, followed by Flexjet (LXJ, 16 flights) and VistaJet (VJA/VJT, 6 flights). Don’t worry, everyone seems to have gotten home in a stylish, comfortable fashion.
Leverage the Flightradar24 API
Want to replicate our findings? We used the Flightradar24 API through Claude (here’s a helpful guide on how to connect the two) and queried the Flightradar24 data vault for business jet departures on February 9th, 2nd and January 26th (the two latter for comparison) out of KSFO, KOAK, KSJC, KLVK, and KHWD.
But Super Bowl LX took place on February 8th, we hear you protest! True, but we’re using UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) and hence the event (and transportation out of there) occurred “the day after”. Our selected time window for all three days was 03:00-10:00 UTC, the logic being that people stayed throughout the game and perhaps even decided to partake in festivities before they departed.
Last but not least, congratulations to the Seattle Seahawks!
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