San Diego Host SuperBowl XXII : It’s San Diego and Jets in Another Big Super Bowl Event

By Super Bowl Sunday, crosswind runway 13/31 at Lindbergh Field should look like “an expensive used car lot,” according to Jack Barkley, director of operations for Jimsair Aviation Services.

Instead of used cars, the usually little-used runway will be filled with as many as 300 luxuriously appointed corporate and private jets that will be carrying VIP passengers into San Diego for the NFL title game, according to Barkley, whose company services private and commercial aircraft at Lindbergh.

If the weather cooperates, part of Montgomery Field will be turned into a second parking lot for the 300 propeller-driven planes that are expected to ferry Super Bowl fans to San Diego.

The 300 corporate and private jets that are expected to fly into Lindbergh Field during Super Bowl week are more than “have ever been here before,” according to Barkley, who said Jimsair normally might service about 50 private aircraft on a very busy day.

Super Bowl XXII on Jan. 31 will draw an unprecedented private air force to San Diego. The planes and jets will face a parking crunch on the ground and hours-long waits for departures after the game. Military bases have agreed to curtail flights to lessen the air traffic and the FAA will add extra controllers to monitor increased arrivals and departures.

‘Wing Tip to Wing Tip’

The Gulfstreams, Citations, Learjets and Falcons will be parked “wing tip to wing tip, all the way down the crosswind runway,” Barkley said. “Some will be chartered but most will belong to Fortune 500 companies.”

Jimsair has even made arrangements to park jets in Palm Springs if runway 13/31 becomes filled. Even tiny Palomar Airport is gearing up for its role as an overflow lot for 75 aircraft--should the incoming wave of airplanes swamp Lindbergh and Montgomery.

With the exception of charter aircraft that unload passengers, refuel and depart, airport officials are steering incoming flights away from the county’s smaller fields, including Gillespie and Palomar, because they lack adequate parking and support facilities.

The Super Bowl is expected to generate a record 3,000 daily takeoffs and landings at the county’s military, commercial and general aviation air fields between Camp Pendleton and the Mexican border.

“That’s uncharted territory for us,” according to Tom Kamman, an FAA manager in San Diego. “We’ve never worked that much traffic before.”

The existing daily record of 2,043 takeoffs and landings was reported during a 24-hour period in 1986 when, for no apparent reason, the county’s airports were extremely busy. The FAA normally handles about 1,600 takeoffs and landings, Kamman said.

Past Super Bowls have generated unprecedented traffic at airports in the host cities.

About 650 airplanes flew to Tampa during Super Bowl week in 1984, and at game time, nearly 500 aircraft were on the ground at Tampa-area airports, according to Ed Cooley, director of general aviation for the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority.

“We had 342 aircraft on the ground at Tampa International (alone) at game time,” Cooley said. “We’d probably (handle) about 50 to 75 aircraft on a good, busy day.”

That kind of volume created a “traffic jam on the runway, with aircraft trying to position themselves to get into line for takeoff,” Cooley said. “It took two to three hours to work that (traffic) out.”

To “keep things safe and manageable” on the ground in San Diego and in the air, the FAA has tightened its grip on the incoming traffic stream during the days before the game.

“The safest airplane we have in the system is the one we have sitting on the ground,” Kamman said. “So we’ll do everything we can to assure that things remain within our capability of controlling them.”

The FAA also has asked the U.S. Navy officials to “severely curtail their traffic on Sunday afternoon and all day on Feb. 1,” Kamman said. Military restrictions would allow FAA air traffic controllers to concentrate on general and commercial aviation, Kamman said.

Miramar Naval Air Station has directed training squadrons to “restrict their operations (so that) only have-to flights will go on Sunday and Monday,” according to a base spokesman. That will eliminate 95% of the base’s regular training operations on Sunday and Monday. However, the base will not be able to restrict all air traffic, the spokesman said.

Additional Controllers

The Federal Aviation Administration will add two air traffic controllers to each shift at its Terminal Radar Approach Control Center during the four days before the game. A total of four controllers will be added to shifts on Super Bowl Sunday and Feb. 1 to handle the anticipated wave of departures.

Airport officials won’t know how many private airplanes are going to arrive until just days--if not hours--before kickoff, largely because pilots need not file FAA-required flight plans until just hours before their departure for San Diego.

Planning is complicated by the fact that bad weather in San Diego or elsewhere in the country could reduce the number of planes making the trip.

During the 1984 Super Bowl, for example, some pilots and passengers opted not to fly into Tampa because of slightly rough weather, according to Tom Raines, an airport operations supervisor for the City of San Diego.

The type and number of planes that will fly to San Diego also will be determined in part by which teams are in the championship game. Small and relatively slow planes that would be too uncomfortable for long flights from Cleveland or Washington would be “just right, say, to make the jump down from San Francisco,” Raines said.

Despite those wild cards, aircraft service companies and government agencies have been preparing Lindbergh and Montgomery for a large-scale invasion by private and corporate airplanes.

Officials have paid close attention to Tampa, which learned that preparation and cooperation by government agencies did reduce air traffic tie-ups, according to Paul MacAlester, a spokesman for the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority, which operates four public airports.

Tampa, like San Diego, has one large commercial airport, a handful of smaller general aviation airports and two large military air bases.

‘Like a Chess Game’

“It’s like a chess game, but hopefully you program the board before the game starts,” MacAlester quipped. “It takes a lot of coordinating work with the air traffic control people, the military and the airport operators.”

Tampa pressed one of its main airport’s three runways--a crosswind runway similar to runway 13/31 in San Diego--into service as a parking lot, MacAlester said. That runway “looked like an aircraft carrier . . . there was lots of aluminum on the field.”

“It was a very dramatic thing to look at,” Cooley recalled. “I’d never seen that many of what we call heavy-metal aircraft--the corporate jets and heavy hitters--at one time at one place, before or since.”

Tampa authorities will be “watching what happens in San Diego because we’ve got Super Bowl XXV here in 1991,” Cooley said.

Airport officials in San Diego expect the airborne assault to begin in time for the nearly weeklong barrage of Super Bowl events that starts on Tuesday, Jan. 25.

“People in L.A. last year said there was no real impact at airports because of the Super Bowl, but they’ve got 25 to 30 airports up there,” Raines said. “We just don’t have that many airports to spread things around.”

The FAA and representatives from local airports in San Diego began planning eight months ago for the influx of out-of-town aircraft, but “even though it seemed like we had all of the time in the world, there are still unknowns,” Kamman said.

FAA officials in Orlando, Miami and New Orleans have advised their counterparts in San Diego to prepare for a “worst-case scenario and then expect even more problems,” according to FAA Air Traffic Manager Bob Vaughn.

Barkley, Raines and Vaughn believe that San Diego will absorb the incoming wave of aircraft--but all worry about the mad dash to get out of town that will begin shortly after the game ends.

Most of the private pilots are expected to file flight plans that request Sunday night or Monday morning departures, Vaughn said. But bad weather in San Diego or elsewhere in the country could slow or stall departures.

Pilots Advised on Delays

Those rush hours are complicated by the fact that regularly scheduled commercial traffic--and the possible wave of outbound charter jets--also will be jockeying for runway rights.

The FAA is advising pilots to expect delays of an hour or more on Sunday night and Monday morning. But Jimsair’s Barkley suggested that delays could stretch to three or four hours.

Those longer delays will materialize if Lindbergh or airports elsewhere in the country are hit by bad weather. If inclement weather does materialize, the FAA will “just slow things down to keep it safe,” Vaughn said.

Perhaps the worst combination of factors facing San Diego’s airports would be having Denver and San Francisco in the Super Bowl--and having bad weather in both of those cities on game day and Feb. 1. “Things would really back up then,” Kamman said.

Despite the record traffic anticipated during Super Bowl week, air field officials and the FAA view the weeklong exercise--and the months of planning that have been undertaken--as a warm-up for the America’s Cup sailboat series that could be held in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego during 1991.

“They’re talking about 2 million visitors over a 4 1/2-month period with 200,000 people for the final series alone,” Kamman said. “That’s going to be interesting.”