How the Hell Can You Stand to Live in San Francisco? Part 8

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5 MIN READ - A few years ago the Cautious Optimism Economics Correspondent ran a series of seven articles on “How the Hell Can You Stand to Live in San Francisco?” outlining insane San Francisco policies that have mushroomed homelessness, crime, open air drug use, housing unaffordability, sky-high apartment rents, high energy prices, expensive and filthy public transportation, poop and syringe littered streets and more.

But one topic he forgot to cover was San Francisco International Airport’s chronic flight delays, an easily solvable problem which of course has been perpetuated by San Francisco politics.

So here it is a few years late: the last in the series (maybe)... on SFO airport.

As anyone who has visited San Francisco has probably noticed, fog is synonymous with the City by the Bay. And while the fog can be quite scenic (until one is inside it), it can wreak havoc with flights into SFO International Airport.

Normally low visibility due to fog or low clouds isn’t a problem as modern aircraft can approach runways using instruments only (so-called “ILS” landings or Instrument Landing System).

However for safety reasons the FAA mandates parallel runways can only accommodate simultaneous ILS landings if they’re built a minimum of 2,500 feet (staggered landings) or 4,300 feet (simultaneous landings) apart.

Well SFO does have parallel runways and they handle parallel landings when visibility is good. 

But they were originally built 750 feet apart which falls far short of the minimum safe distance. So when the fog rolls in—which it does frequently—SFO shuts one of two runways down for landings, slashing the airport’s capacity by half.

This wreaks havoc with flight schedules as the Correspondent himself can attest to from his business travel days. Coming home from a work trip on a Friday night it wasn’t uncommon to change planes in Chicago O’Hare or Dallas/Fort-Worth Airport just to find the reader boards advising the connecting flight to San Francisco was delayed from, say... a 6 PM departure to 9PM or 10PM.

Meanwhile flights into Oakland Airport, which has very few flights on major airlines other than Southwest, continued to operate normally since OAK has only one runway.

Incidentally SFO is also United Airlines’ major West Coast hub, so all those delays generate lots of misconnections, stranding passengers in the airport.

SOLUTION

The dual runways problem is easily solved by building a new runway (and possibly dismantling an old one) with a minimum parallel distance of 2,500 feet. 

In fact, this solution was identified decades ago by the airport authority and a diagram of the proposed runway is attached to this column. The new runway would eliminate literally tens of thousands of annual flight delays and reduce fuel consumption by planes that are caught by sudden ATC adjustments while approaching San Francisco and forced to circle while waiting their turn.

So after all these decades why no new runway to solve the problem?

Left wing environmentalists of course!

The local greenies have stymied the new runway proposal at every turn, the big complaint being that the new runway would require dumping mud into the bay and building out into the water. The most ambitious plan would require paving 1.5 square miles into the bay.

This, the environmentalists say, is an unacceptable pollution of San Francisco Bay which, by the way, is nearly 1,600 square miles large. Hence the new runway would intrude into 0.094% of the bay’s surface area (yes, that’s less than one-one thousandth).

In return for permitting runway construction into the bay the San Francisco Airport Authority has promised to buy 1.7 square miles of North Bay farmland, which was dyked and drained decades ago, and restore it to wetlands with a permanent “no development" status.

But of course that too is unacceptable to the environmental lobby which doesn’t care about wetlands or nature preserves because their goal is really just stopping human progress.

When asked what’s wrong with the wetlands proposal, environmentalists then pivoted to complaining that trading water for land isn’t the issue. The problem, they say, is that building the new runway into the bay might interfere with the operation of Coyote Point Marina, a nearby harbor that houses mostly yachts.

Aside from the point that Coyote Point is far away from the proposed new runway and the Economics Correspondent doesn’t see how the harbor could be heavily impacted, the real laugh is San Francisco progressive greenies suddenly say they care about a yacht playground for San Francisco’s super wealthy.

Next up they’ll express concern the new runway isn’t big enough to handle Trump’s private 757 and needs to be expanded.

To read a more detailed story about the rejected land-for-water deal from 2001 (yes, they were even holding up airport improvements that long ago), see linked article at the end of this column.

So the massive flight delays continue as San Francisco's Board of Supervisors have used environmental concerns as a pretext to kill all attempts to relieve the bottlenecks with a new runway. SFO remains (according to the Correspondent’s count) only one of four major city airports without two parallel runways separated by the FAA minimum safe distance—the other three being New York LaGuardia, Boston Logan, and Newark. Neither of the first two handle either the same air traffic or hub traffic as SFO, and Newark, which is neck and neck with SFO for takeoffs and landings, doesn’t have the problem of constant low fog.

In fact LaGuardia doesn’t even have parallel runways at all, so they schedule landings based on their actual capacity. Unlike SFO they don’t have a second runway to shut down under low visibility conditions, making SFO unique among all major U.S. airports in its leading share of arriving flights impacted by low visibility.

UPSET PASSENGERS

And the greatest irony of all is passenger anger with the delays.

The Correspondent has experienced many of these fog related delays from his business travel days and seen a lot of irate passengers. He’s seen/heard them lambasting the airlines (it’s not their fault) either verbally at the gate or on the phone calling their friends/loved ones waiting in SFO.

Now it’s hard to say how many of these angry passengers actually live in San Francisco or the Bay Area. For non-United flights (where SFO is almost certainly a terminus) something probably slightly less than half the passengers on every flight live in the Bay Area while the other half are visiting, but over time that still adds up to a lot of people; enough that there’s no doubt many the Correspondent has listened to blasting the airline reside in the Bay Area itself.

Hence simple math, given the large majority of Bay Area residents who are themselves left-leaning environmentalists, informs us many of those complaining passengers support the very policies that delayed them by three or four hours getting home.

Yet, in progressive fashion, they blame the airline and probably “capitalism” for the delay since they’re usually clueless about the connection between their own policy/voting preferences and the consequences they create—such as sky high housing prices, sky high rents, out of control property theft, ballooning homelessness, human poop and syringes on the sidewalks, and yes… three and four hour flight delays to get home whenever the fog rolls in.
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Example of environmentalists stopping construction of new runway to reduce flight delays:

"SFO officials dump 1 of the 4 runway-project plans / But environmentalists still not happy with size of the others."

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SFO-officials-dump-1-of-the-4-runway-project-2891381.php