How much does it cost to have a flight of fighter planes to flyover a stadium? Who pays for it? I really can’t see the owners of a team paying for it, so does it fall on us poor taxpayers who aren’t even at the game?
Actual cost, I dunno, but it’s arranged through Navy Public Affairs, or by arrangement through the nearest Naval Recruiting District. The cost comes out of either NAVCRUITCOM or CHINFO, depending on who arranged the flyover, and for what purpose.
The requirements to get a fly-over scheduled are fairly stringent (so, no, most likely you’re not going to get the fly-over for your nephew’s Pop Warner game), but usually are scheduled with pilots that would’ve had to fly that week anyway to keep their air-time up, so it’s not all that big a deal.
Ultimately, the taxpayers pay for it – although there may be charges to the team, the stadium, or whoever.
What you have to realize is that military pilots are required to fly a certain number of flight hours for training to maintain currency and proficiency in the aircraft itself, flying in formation, etc.
The aircraft will be flown anyway; so the net cost is the same regardless of whether they are flying over a football game for thousands to see, or at some remote training base. This is a common misconception among an awful lot of Americans – that somehow taxpayers dollars are being ‘wasted.’ Not true.
In fact, authorized flight hours are “banked” just like any other commodity, and with budget cuts, pilots lose valuable training time, increasing their risk when it comes to combat. I saw this first hand in the military over a period of years – and it’s scary.
Those types of fighters are flying all of the time. Much of that time is over the open ocean where no civilian taxpayers get to see them. Each fighter cost several thousand dollars per hour to operate (figure 3 - 6 thousand per hour for a rough estimate). It is pretty expensive to do a fighter formation over a stadium but people like it because it looks cool, it is a good PR stunt, it does count as training that the pilots would be doing anyway, and the actual cost per spectator is rather low.