Taylor Swift needs to travel from Tokyo to Las Vegas this weekend.
She will most likely use a private jet to get from Japan's capital, where she will perform Saturday night, to Sin City, where her boyfriend Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs will play the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII Sunday afternoon.
The pop superstar certainly won't be the only person using that mode of transportation to get to an event that attracts people of great importance, fame and wealth.
So where are all those planes going to park?
Let's hope Swift or whoever is making those arrangements for her thinks well ahead of time because Las Vegas is fully booked this weekend when it comes to parking spots for private jets.
(A representative for Swift did not immediately respond to The Times about the singer's travel plans.)
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that it expects 3,500 more takeoffs and landings than usual at local airports, including Harry Reid International, Henderson Executive, North Las Vegas and Boulder City, this weekend, with about 500 planes parked. In those places.
The math there seems to indicate a supply and demand problem.
“This is the first Super Bowl in Las Vegas,” Joe Rajchel, spokesman for the Clark County Aviation Department, told The Times on Thursday. “Demand would be expected to be high and it has been a high demand weekend. “People want to be here, whether they’re going to the game or not, I think people just want to be in town and be close to the activity.”
The FAA has a parking and airspace reservation system at those airports from February 6 to 13 to help regulate the high volume of air traffic expected.
Reservations for parking aircraft at airports are managed by fixed-base operators. Clark County serves as the fixed-base operator for the Henderson and North Las Vegas airports, and Rajchel said slots at those locations will be full throughout the weekend.
Two private companies, Signature Aviation and Atlantic Aviation, handle those operations for Harry Reid International. A statement on Signature's website says parking at that airport has “reached capacity during the Super Bowl event” and that there is “an extensive waiting list for any cancellations.”
A representative for Atlantic told The Times on Thursday that its slots have been full “probably for a few weeks now,” adding that the size of the planes was a factor.
“If it's much smaller planes, we can accommodate more,” the representative said, “but for this event we have much larger planes, so we can accommodate less in that regard.”
The two fixed-base operators serving the Boulder City Airport, Boulder City Aviation Services and BFE Flight Services, reached their slot limit long ago. BFE manager Randy Saenz said his company could accommodate more planes.
“People are begging and asking me to give them a place,” he told The Times on Friday.
But he said, “I can't. She is not in my capacity. Boulder City was allocated a small number of spaces.”
Saenz said he hopes the FAA will “modify” its regulations the next time the Super Bowl is held in the area.
“I don't think they really understood how much traffic goes through this airport when there's a special event in Las Vegas,” he said.
Saenz added that he still has room for certain small planes or helicopters that aren't subject to FAA restrictions, but most people looking to park there this weekend don't have planes that fall into that category.
Your advice to those people?
“I called a year in advance,” Sáenz said.
