How we build event flight trackers

What these pages are

When a big event draws private jets to one city, the airports around that city get unusually busy for a week. We build a flight tracker for each event that lays out how much traffic showed up, when it peaked, where it came from, what types of aircraft made the trip, and roughly how much fuel was burned.

Where the data comes from

Modern aircraft broadcast their position once a second through a small radio called an ADS-B transponder. Volunteer hobbyists around the world run antennas that pick those broadcasts up and feed them into open databases. We download the daily archive for the days surrounding an event and pull out every flight that landed or departed inside the host-city airport cluster.

Trackers post about a week after the event ends, once the archives for the final day are available.

What we mean by "the host-city cluster"

Most coverage of a big event only counts arrivals at the main airport. For the Masters, that means Augusta Regional alone. The problem is that Augusta Regional fills up. Once it does, charters overflow to Daniel Field a few miles away, and to Aiken Municipal across the South Carolina line.

We include the whole cluster (the main airport plus any nearby fields that routinely catch the overflow) so the numbers reflect what actually happened over the week, not just what one airport saw. This is also why our totals usually run higher than press reports.

The CO2 estimate

For each flight, we know how long it was in the air and what kind of aircraft it was. Multiply minutes by typical fuel burn for that aircraft category, then by a standard figure for how much CO2 a gallon of jet fuel produces, and you get an emissions estimate.

Heavy jets burn about 365 gallons an hour. Mid-size jets burn around 230. Light jets, 175. Turboprops, 95. Jet fuel produces 9.57 kilograms of CO2 per gallon burned. Multiply it out across thousands of legs and the totals come within about 10 to 15 percent of what you'd get from each aircraft's flight manual.

"Notable arrivals"

We rank tail numbers by how many legs they flew into the event cluster during the week. Flight-school props and other casual general-aviation traffic gets filtered out so the list reflects business-aviation activity. Tail numbers that match aircraft in our public database link to their individual pages.

Take-down requests

If your tail number is on the notable-arrivals list and you'd rather it weren't, email [email protected] with the tail and a brief reason. We honor case-by-case takedowns of identifying information. The aggregate counts (total flights, peak day, top origins) stay published either way.

One page per year

Each event year is its own page. Masters 2025 lives at /events/masters/flight-tracker/ until we publish Masters 2026, at which point the prior year moves to a dated archive URL and the canonical address points to the newest year. Year-over-year comparisons appear on the page once we have two years of data.