Analyzing NFL team charter flight patterns
Teams log thousands of miles per season in some of the largest commercial aircraft available
Travel is a reality of any major sport. But the NFL does it on a scale even larger than many other professional leagues.
American football teams are bigger both in roster and in literal size of the players compared to other sports. This presents a logistics problem for teams and the airlines flying them from city to city during the season.
Doug Kroll at JetTip writes a weekly blog that tracks each NFL teams’ charter flights for geeks like me that are interested in the cross section of sports and aviation. Using this fantastic resource I examined how much each team has traveled so far this season, and the types of airplanes and airlines they’re utilizing to get to their games.
See the interactive dashboard here to explore some of these trends in greater detail.
X’s and O’s of travel
What’s interesting when you compare the NFL to other leagues is teams only have eight away games to travel to per season. That’s much fewer than other sports like in the NHL and NBA, let alone MLB, where teams have 40-plus games on the road each year. Because of this commercial airlines don’t find flying these teams to be a lucrative venture, and have cancelled some of these contracts in recent years due to the financial burden it presents. Teams will typically fly out to the away city on a Friday or a Saturday, and rather than being put to use on normal commercial routes during the weekend, these planes sit on the tarmac for 24 or more hours waiting for the games to finish on Sunday (or sometimes Mondays).
And because NFL teams are traveling with a 56-man roster of players, coaches and support staff, they need planes that can fit more than 100 people every time they fly. That is in addition to the thousands of pounds of luggage, gear and other equipment needed to staff an entire roster on game day. So they can’t use some of the more common, short haul aircrafts that you and I might fly on between domestic destinations.
Some NFL teams have contracts in place with recognizable airlines such as United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines. Others use dedicated charter companies like Atlas Air and Omni Air International, according to the video by Wendover Productions below. The NFL lets teams handle their own travel arrangements, unlike other leagues which have league-wide partnerships with certain airlines (eg. the NBA with Delta).
Two teams — the New England Patriots and Arizona Cardinals — even purchased their own planes in recent years to avoid some of the logistical issues of flying a football team. The Cardinals were the second NFL team to buy their own aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER1 purchased from Delta in 2021, while the Patriots acquired two Boeing 767-300ERs back in 2017.
The Pats’ plane is unmistakable. What’s cleverly known as AirKraft One2 has a team-themed livery that boasts New England’s logo and the number of Lombardi Trophies won proudly on its tail.
The Cardinals-owned plane was first delivered to Delta in 2002 and served with the airline until its Boeing 777 fleet was retired in October 2020. According to The Points Guy, the Cardinals left the Delta configuration in place, including the carrier's latest Delta One Suites.
Football players are much larger people than the general population3, so they need ample room to spread out. The service on board isn’t the same as a typical flight either, as diets and nutritional needs to play at football’s highest level means there is way more food and snacks available on these charters than you’d normally see as a commercial passenger.
Who’s flying most?
Delta charters the most flights and logs the most miles of all airlines carrying NFL teams4. They’ve flown 13 different teams nearly 112,000 miles so far this year5; teams use a combination of their Airbus A330s, Boeing 767s, 757s and 737s to get across the country. United is second with about 110 flights flown for 10 different teams. Those teams primarily use United’s fleet of Boeing 777s and 787 Dreamliners, the same aircrafts primarily utilized for the carrier’s international routes.
Atlas Air, the traditional charter airline, has serviced six different teams primarily with 747s, including the Miami Dolphins, Jacksonville Jaguars and Baltimore Ravens during the 2024 season. Unsurprisingly the teams that live in certain airlines’ hubs, such as Delta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, or United’s Chicago O’Hare International, use those home carriers most often.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has stated one of his goals is to play regular season games in countries outside the United States. This season alone we’ve seen games in London, England, Munich, Germany and Sao Paulo, Brazil. As you’d imagine the complexities and costs of flying a team domestically are multiplied when trying to get those teams to other countries internationally.
This season the Patriots, Jaguars, Chicago Bears, Minnesota Vikings, New York Giants and Carolina Panthers have all played games abroad, so it’s no surprise those teams have logged among the most miles.
That being said, the Dolphins and Seahawks have logged the second and third most miles, respectively — behind only Philadelphia, which flew to Brazil in Week 1 — despite not having played any games outside the US. Each of Miami’s away games have required the team to travel more than 1,000 miles; the Seahawks have traveled 2,000 miles on each of their road trips save one trip to division rival San Francisco in Week 11.
International expansion
The NFL is so committed to expanding the game outside US borders it contributed $12.5M to the construction of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London to make it the de facto home of the NFL when it’s in England. Spurs’ stadium even has a purpose-built, permanent American football field under the soccer pitch for when the NFL is in town.
While it’s the teams’ responsibility to schedule flights for regular away games, the league provides the travel accommodations for the international trips, which they’ve been using Virgin Atlantic Airways for.
There are no more international games on the calendar in 2024, but we are now getting to the fun part of the NFL season where the weather starts turning and we get more games with playoff implications.
Games this week will be spread across multiple days because of the Thanksgiving holiday, so if you’re interested you can follow all of the away team flights throughout the weekend by going to a flight tracking website such as FlightRadar24. For example, here’s the Bears’ latest flight to Detroit in preparation for Thursday’s game at Ford Field against the Lions:
The ER stands for Extended Range.
The New England Patriots’ owner is Robert Kraft.
I’ve collated the data and put it into a Google Sheet here if you want to explore yourself. If I have time I will write a follow up post on how to scrape the flight info from JetTip and get it into a format that is good for analysis like this one. If you’re interested I used a combination of R, Tableau and Google Sheets for this exercise. The R script is available on my GitHub.
Pending flights for Week 13 games this week.