University Park Airport Expecting Historic Flight Numbers Ahead of Penn State-Auburn Game

When you think of Penn State football traffic, you think about trying to get down Atherton Street or making your way through Seven Mountains or perhaps coming in on I-99.

But do you think of the sky?

University Park Airport Director Bryan Rodgers does. In fact, he’s been thinking about it a lot over the past several months as Penn State gets set to face Auburn on Saturday night at Beaver Stadium in a rare meeting between the Nittany Lions and an SEC team in State College.

“This game has generated a lot of interest and it has been that way for quite some time,” Rodgers said on Wednesday. “We started getting phone calls from aircraft operators back in late spring, early summer who were making plans on coming up here for, for this particular game.”

“Back in 2011 [when Penn State hosted Alabama] over a 16-hour period our air traffic control oversaw 340 aircraft operations takeoffs and landings,” Rodgers added. “So we’re expecting something similar, if not more for this.”

The preparation for weekends like this one has been going on for months. University Park Airport is bringing in a third fuel truck to deal with getting planes ready to go as quickly as possible. The air traffic control tower will also stay open four hours longer than usual.

Last weekend when Penn State took on Ball State, the airport housed around 30 planes. According to Rodgers the expectation is that number could be three or four times that when it’s all said and done, effectively the airport’s operating capacity. In turn if that number is finally reached, planes could be asked to do drop-and-goes, or effectively sending the planes elsewhere to wait for their return flights home.

As you might imagine that makes for an all-hands-on-deck situation with air traffic expected to pickup as soon as Thursday and only continue to grow as the weekend goes along.

For those keen on looking up over the next few days, expect to see a variety of air craft coming in as well. Auburn will fly in on a Boeing 757, while corporate jets like Gulfstream 650s and more than a few single-engine planes also expected to call the airport home this weekend as well.

University Park Airport will also see over 20 additional commercial flights head onto the tarmac this weekend as United and Delta Airlines both booked special flights from several southern cities to help account for the demand to get to State College.

All told, there could be so much traffic in the air above State College that the Federal Aviation Administration could end up calling for a ground-delay or ground-stop program until the skies clear again. It happened ahead of Penn State’s game against Alabama in 2011 and could very well happen this weekend.

In fact, Rodgers is planning on it.

“When you look back on the Alabama game one of the things that happened during that game was that the FAA instituted a ground delay program or ground stop program,” Rodgers recalled. “Meaning that the airspace, and the amount of aircraft coming into University Park Airport reached a saturation point where they just had to say ‘no more until things ease up a bit.’

“You know, people get to experience that all the time, if you’re traveling to a major hub airport like Philadelphia or maybe a Chicago O’Hare. It’s probably nothing to be proud of if you’re that airport but when it happens in airports, such as University Park Airport, it’s like wow we got so much traffic we get to that point where the major hub airports find themselves in on much more frequent basis.”

Rodgers is hopeful that various strategic initiatives – keeping the control tower open longer and calling in more fuel trucks – will help ease the stress on the airport this weekend. That being said, there’s no two ways around it: it’s going to be a busy weekend.

“Looking at how well our employees do handling all those customers and all those aircraft and then, you know, safely handling all those aircraft and getting them parked and getting them to the game and getting out again — I think it’s a real testament to to those folks that do that.”

So if you’re coming to State College this weekend keep your eyes on the road, but if you get a chance to look up, you might see more than a few planes waiting for their turn to land.