AIRCRAFT CHARTER
CHARTER KEEPS THE INTERNATIONAL SPORTS INDUSTRY FLYING Elite athletes – golfers, footballers, rugby, tennis players and cricketers, are used to the fact that private charter (six to 60 seat jets) is their optimum form of air travel, enabling them to keep fully in control of itineraries. Covid-19 hit the airline industry hard with regular airlines still a long way off resuming full pre-pandemic schedules. The first sector to recover was charter. WORDS: RICHARD SMITH, DIRECTOR OF CHARTER, ACC AVIATION
Without it many international sporting events simply would not have happened, as teams of 40 players or more, plus support staff and equipment, relied on aircraft charters to keep their sporting schedules running. Charter was also crucial during the Tokyo Olympics, with participating athletes required to stay in bubbles to avoid unnecessary contact with others.
These past 18 months, working across five continents, we have embraced a wider, supporting role as Covid travel advisors, regularly dispensing advice to our clients on the rapidly changing requirements, providing close liaison on trip support, adhering to country restrictions as borders opened (and closed at short notice), and ensuring all relevant paperwork was presented or prearranged. We dispatched accompanying flight riders to liaise with airline/bizjet operators and airports on the spot, enabling team operations managers to stay focused on players and support staff. After 18 months of disruption, charter is soaring as the go to solution. It’s being 32 | OTFF ISSUE 18 ★ DECEMBER 2021
used more widely too – by both men’s and women’s teams, equally, who have turned to charter over scheduled services. We have facilitated several long-haul flights bringing international football players back from their international duties at World Cup Qualifier games, ensuring they make it back to their domestic club matches in the fastest time possible. In addition to national and league football teams, rugby charter flights have also increased, fulfilling requirements from the United Rugby Championship (formerly Pro 14), European Champions, Challenge Cups and Super League. We have provided increasing numbers of charter flights to national Rugby Union teams for their European competition
matches, where aircraft like the 90-seat Embraer 190, readily available, with good operators, is ideally sized, modern and reliable. The competitively priced 70-seat ATR72 turboprop has also proven to be a popular option for short-haul rugby flights. Outside the regular professional teams that entrust ACC Aviation with their domestic and international travel, we recently arranged an all-business class Boeing 737 to fly a world-renowned boxer, accompanied by his management team, friends and family, to and from a fight night in Atlanta. The aircraft was parked and staged at a private terminal in San Antonio, TX, where media and press gathered to receive the passengers on arrival and departure. We work with specialist travel management companies (TMCs) to provide fan travel solutions, anywhere in the world. In one such instance we flew 250 fans from Mexico City to Moscow, when the original flight provider become unavailable hours before their original scheduled departure. We were able to source a lastminute replacement aircraft
