This might not be a huge issue for some places, but SFO is extremely fog-prone, to put it mildly. When you lose that visibility, it kills the arrival rate. If you’ve landed at SFO, you know that you can get pretty close to an airplane next to you in good weather. What defines bad weather? It’s poor visibility that matters. Nobody would ever design an airport that way today because when the weather goes downhill, you lose the ability to land on both runways at the same time. Those parallel runways are separated by a mere 750 feet. The problem is when the weather isn’t good. This works great when the weather is good with up to 60 arrivals per hour. Arrivals along with some long haul and Hawai’i departures usually use runways 28L and 28R. The standard operation at SFO has most departures using runways 1L and 1R. That in itself isn’t a terrible design for places where the winds can shift since you generally want to go into the wind when you can. Let’s look at a visual to make some sense of this.Īs you can see, SFO has two sets of parallel runways which are perpendicular to each other. Let’s start with the problem at hand.įor those who aren’t aware, San Francisco has a runway problem that can make life miserable for travelers when the weather gets bad. Assuming Virgin America stays in business, delays are only going to increase and a regulatory solution may the only short term option that will work. I’ve long felt that it wouldn’t be fair to restrict traffic at SFO just because things go downhill on bad weather days, but I’m reconsidering my position. For me, it’s SFO and its lagging on time performance that once again sticks out like a sore thumb. With 2012 over, it’s fun to look back on performance statistics to see what stands out.
0 kommentar(er)
