Sunday, October 22, 2006
Bay Area Fliers: Avoid SFO Between January and March
Anyone who lives here in the Bay Area knows that it rains like crazy here between January and March. For some odd reason, when it's raining here during that time, San Francisco International (SFO) always seems to get backed up like a rest-stop toilet, with arrival and departure delays exceeding two hours. But air traffic into and out of Oakland International (OAK), just a few miles across the Bay, continues to flow relatively smoothly (insert your own scatological simile here).
I'll explain why this is below. But the message to take away from this post is simple: If ya need to get somewhere by air from Jan-Mar, and ya can't afford the get stuck in the airport, fly from OAK instead of SFO. Even though the cab ride and BART trips from OAK to San Francisco are more expensive than from SFO, and even though Greyhound would be embarrassed as hell if any of its bus stations looked like OAK, it still makes sense to fly through OAK.
So, wtf? Why is that?
The explanation is simple.
As you can see from this picture, SFO's runways are laid out like an 'X', with two parallel runways going in each direction of the 'X'. Normally, two airplanes can land at the same time (one on each of the two parallel runways--this is called "simultaneous parallel operation"). The airlines rely on this in planning their schedules in and out of SFO. Without simultaneous parallel operations, SFO couldn't handle all of the traffic that the airlines schedule.
But compared to many other airports of its size (Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, etc...), SFO's parallel runways are very, very close to each other. For this reason, the FAA doesn't allow parallel ops into SFO when the weather gets cruddy and the visibility drops. The problem is that the airlines still have just as many flights scheduled to land at SFO during those times. Because SFO's capacity is essentially half of what it normally is, what you end up with are too many flights arriving and not enough landing slots to fit them all in. Arrival delays quickly mount to two hours or more. Arrival delays lead to departure delays. And this leads to the entire airport becoming one ferkakte (i.e., lousy or screwed up) disaster zone. This is one of the reasons that Southwest and many of the other Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) operate out of OAK instead of SFO (more on this another day).
OAK, on the other hand, only has one runway used by commercial carriers (it's the longest one on the left of the diagram). Thus, during even the best weather, the airlines can only schedule arrivals on the one runway. So when the weather turns bad, OAK doesn't have its capacity cut in half like SFO. Even though arrivals are a little bit more spread out, delays are rare.
Until the day comes that SFO can move its arrival runways farther apart (chances are that we'll develop teleporting before this happens), SFO will continue to be screwed in bad weather, while OAK is hardly impacted. For this reason, if you need to travel to or from the Bay Area from January to March and your time is tight, try OAK instead of SFO.
I'll explain why this is below. But the message to take away from this post is simple: If ya need to get somewhere by air from Jan-Mar, and ya can't afford the get stuck in the airport, fly from OAK instead of SFO. Even though the cab ride and BART trips from OAK to San Francisco are more expensive than from SFO, and even though Greyhound would be embarrassed as hell if any of its bus stations looked like OAK, it still makes sense to fly through OAK.
So, wtf? Why is that?
The explanation is simple.
As you can see from this picture, SFO's runways are laid out like an 'X', with two parallel runways going in each direction of the 'X'. Normally, two airplanes can land at the same time (one on each of the two parallel runways--this is called "simultaneous parallel operation"). The airlines rely on this in planning their schedules in and out of SFO. Without simultaneous parallel operations, SFO couldn't handle all of the traffic that the airlines schedule.But compared to many other airports of its size (Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, etc...), SFO's parallel runways are very, very close to each other. For this reason, the FAA doesn't allow parallel ops into SFO when the weather gets cruddy and the visibility drops. The problem is that the airlines still have just as many flights scheduled to land at SFO during those times. Because SFO's capacity is essentially half of what it normally is, what you end up with are too many flights arriving and not enough landing slots to fit them all in. Arrival delays quickly mount to two hours or more. Arrival delays lead to departure delays. And this leads to the entire airport becoming one ferkakte (i.e., lousy or screwed up) disaster zone. This is one of the reasons that Southwest and many of the other Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) operate out of OAK instead of SFO (more on this another day).
OAK, on the other hand, only has one runway used by commercial carriers (it's the longest one on the left of the diagram). Thus, during even the best weather, the airlines can only schedule arrivals on the one runway. So when the weather turns bad, OAK doesn't have its capacity cut in half like SFO. Even though arrivals are a little bit more spread out, delays are rare.Until the day comes that SFO can move its arrival runways farther apart (chances are that we'll develop teleporting before this happens), SFO will continue to be screwed in bad weather, while OAK is hardly impacted. For this reason, if you need to travel to or from the Bay Area from January to March and your time is tight, try OAK instead of SFO.
