No, the United States Air Force did not unveil a new fleet of jets in the New Orleans area late Sunday night. 

The scene at Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain featured a parade of private aircraft departing, transporting a multitude of billionaires and celebrities seeking to escape the aftermath of Super Bowl LIX at the Superdome.

According to data from @Flightradar24, numerous private planes were monitored leaving New Orleans on Sunday night.

Director of Aviation at Lakefront Airport, Bruce Martin, revealed in a previous statement to Fox8live.com that the facility had been receiving between 200 and 400 aircraft arrivals daily in the week leading up to the game. An estimated count of around 1,200 private jets was anticipated to utilize the airport, with additional air traffic expected at the larger Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport that primarily handles commercial flights.

‘You’re going to get the tourists flying commercial going into [Louis Armstrong Airport],’ Lakefront executive director Louis Capo told Fox8Live.com in a January 31 piece. ‘Here, you’re going to get the NFL owners, the major corporations.’

DailyMail.com has reached out to Martin and Capo for updated figures.

Judging by the animated time-lapsed graphic, many of the jets flew back to a few specific locations. Naturally some flights were seen returning to the Philadelphia or the New Jersey area, where many wealthy Eagles fans reside, as well as the Kansas-Missouri border for Chiefs supporters. 

But there was a conspicuous amount of traffic returning to the Palm Beach, Florida area, which makes sense. Not only did President Donald Trump take Air Force One from Palm Beach to New Orleans for the game, but other attendees such as billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft also own homes in the area. However, it is unclear if Kraft flew to the game from Florida or elsewhere. 

There was a temporary flying restriction in the area due to the presence of Air Force One, but when Trump left the game early to return to Palm Beach, Lakefront Airport managed to safely get everyone else on their way, Martin told DailyMail.com. 

Regardless of the specifics, though, many were still horrified to see America’s wealthiest football fans dumping tons of carbon pollution across the country rather than sharing commercial flights with the masses.

‘How the 1% lives,’ one person wrote on X. ‘Must be nice. None of them should ever say a word about the environment.’

‘Eat the rich!’ added another. 

Carbon pollution from private jets has soared in the past five years, with most of those small planes spewing more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in about two hours of flying than the average person does in about a year, a November study found.

About a quarter million of the super wealthy — worth a total of $31 trillion —emitted 17.2 million tons (15.6 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide flying in private jets in 2023, according to the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment. That’s about the same amount as the 67 million people who live in Tanzania,

Private jet emissions jumped 46 percent from 2019 to 2023, according to the European research team that calculated those figures by examining more than 18.6 million flights of about 26,000 airplanes over five years.

Only 1.8 percent of the carbon pollution from aviation is spewed by private jets and aviation as a whole is responsible for about 4 percent of the human-caused heat-trapping gases, the study said.

It may seem like a small amount, but it’s a matter of fairness and priorities, said the study’s lead author, Stefan Gossling, a transportation researcher at the business school of Sweden’s Linnaeus University.

‘The damage is done by those with a lot of money and the cost is borne by those with very little money,’ Gossling said.

The highest emitting private jet user that the team tracked — but did not identify by name — spewed 2,645 tons (2,400 metric tons) of carbon dioxide in plane use, Gossling said. That’s more than 500 times the global per person average of either 5.2 tons (4.7 metric tons) that the World Bank calculates or the 4.7 tons (4.3 metric tons) that the International Energy Agency figures and Gossling cites.

‘This report presents further proof that billionaires are causing the climate crisis,’ said Jonathan Westin, executive director of the advocacy organization Climate Organizing Hub. ‘They are clinging to their private jets and oil profits while regular people see increasing floods, hurricanes and wildfires.’

Earlier in 2024, the International Energy Agency calculated that the world’s top 1 percent of super-emitting people had carbon footprints more than 1,000 times bigger than the globe’s poorest 1 percent.

Gossling’s study counted more than 35,600 tons (32,300 metric tons) of carbon pollution from just five global events — 2022’s World Cup in Qatar, 2023’s World Economic Forum, 2023’s Super Bowl, the 2023 Cannes film festival and the 2023 United Nations climate negotiations in Dubai. That came from 3,500 private jet flights.