Game day by air: Athens, Auburn, Tuscaloosa and Knoxville from Atlanta

Fall is the busiest season we have, and most of it is football. The pattern is the same every week: a family or a group of friends who would rather spend Saturday at the tailgate than in a car on I-20 or I-85, and who want to sleep in their own bed that night.

Here is how the common ones go from PDK.

Georgia at Athens

Athens-Ben Epps is about ten minutes from Sanford Stadium and the flight from PDK is under twenty-five minutes. The appeal is less the flight time and more the drive you skip: on a home Saturday the loop and 316 are a parking lot. We land, a car meets the airplane, and you are at the tailgate before people who left Buckhead at the same time have cleared Lawrenceville.

Auburn

Auburn University Regional is a couple of miles from Jordan-Hare. The leg from Atlanta is about half an hour. Same story on the ground: the airport is on the edge of campus and the cars know exactly where to go.

Alabama at Tuscaloosa

Tuscaloosa National is about fifteen minutes from Bryant-Denny and the flight is around forty-five minutes. This is the trip where the airplane pays for itself in sanity. The drive through Birmingham on a game day is three and a half hours if nothing goes wrong.

Tennessee at Knoxville

McGhee Tyson is about twenty minutes from Neyland and the flight is thirty-five minutes. If you are making a weekend of it, Blackberry Farm is forty minutes from the airport in the other direction.

Further out

Nashville for Vanderbilt is forty-five minutes. Columbia, Clemson, Oxford and Gainesville are all under an hour and a quarter, and Baton Rouge and Fayetteville are the ones where you start to feel the difference between the airplane and a jet, so we talk it through before you book.

How the day usually goes

Out at ten, on the ground by eleven, tailgate, game, dinner if you want it, and home by ten or eleven that night. Five people, clubs or coolers in the back, dog if the dog is coming. One firm number for the round trip, quoted before you decide. Game weekends go early, so it is worth holding dates as soon as the schedule is out.

The airplane needs about 2,000 feet of runway, which is why we can use the small fields close to the stadiums instead of the big airport an hour away. If your team is not on this list, it is almost certainly still an easy trip. Ask us.