ASHWAUBENON, Wis. — Two years of work and preparation are about to come to fruition at Green Bay Austin Straubel International Airport.
The facility will be the first — and last — impression that many fans in the area for the NFL Draft will have of the Green Bay area.“We’ve been building up for this since May of 2023 when the draft was announced that it would be in Green Bay,” said Marty Piette, airport director. “Day one, the first phone call was to our airline partners.”
The airports in Green Bay and Appleton added additional flights specifically for fans arriving for the draft.
In Green Bay, that includes flights from other NFL markets, including Los Angeles and New York, as well as division rivals such as Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis.
“Those flights filled up so well that we actually heard yesterday that Delta added two additional flights between Minneapolis for next week,” Piette said. “We’re seeing those flights sell out pretty quickly.”
Wisconsin Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Federal Security Director Mark Lendvay said there will be additional TSA agents from around the state in both Green Bay and Appleton.
“Right now, it looks like the majority of the traffic will be between Green Bay, Appleton and Milwaukee,” he said. “We are not seeing a significant uptick in traffic for Milwaukee.”
This type of event isn’t new for airports in the state.
“We’ve rehearsed this. This is really our fourth big event. We’ve had the DNC. We had the Ryder Cup. We just had the RNC and now the draft,” Lendvay said. “We’re going to be in the trenches and prepared for this.”
It’s not just the airline side of the business that’s expected to feel the impact of the draft. It extends to people flying in on private and corporate aircraft.
“For a home game, people come in, go to the game and leave,” Piette said. “This is going to be over the course of a week where we’re making sure that people are parked where they can still access their aircraft, come and go as they need to. It’s taken quite a bit of coordination with not only the [fixed base operators] but even air traffic control to make sure we can handle the flow of traffic during the draft.”
