After reviewing policies and procedures for side-by-side approaches at San Francisco International Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Tuesday that it was restricting the number of hourly flight arrivals.
For travelers at SFO, that means approximately a quarter of all arriving flights are expected to be delayed, airport spokesperson Doug Yakel told SFGATE in an email. “While we were forecasting about 15% of flights being delayed during our runway construction project, we expect this change will increase the delay potential to approximately 25% of arriving flights experiencing a delay of at least 30 minutes,” he wrote.
A spokesperson for the FAA told SFGATE that its decision to prohibit side-by-side approaches was unrelated to SFO’s runway project and it was a coincidence that the restrictions occurred a day apart. The FAA is constantly reviewing its aircraft separation policy, and after a recent analysis on side-by-side approaches at SFO, the agency determined the procedure was unsafe.
“The FAA safety measure prohibits flights from making side-by-side approaches to SFO’s parallel east-west runways in clear weather when the pilots acknowledge having the other aircraft in sight,” the FAA spokesperson explained in an email. “It requires staggered approaches, with one aircraft offset from the aircraft on the parallel runway. The FAA never allowed side-by-side approaches in bad weather.”
The airport closed Runway 1 Right on Monday for six months to repave the surface layer, improve the taxiway and other projects. Due to this closure, SFO was initially authorized 45 hourly arrivals, but the new FAA restrictions cut that down to 36. Once the runway repaving is finished, that arrival figure can rise back up to 45 under the new FAA restriction. Yakel said that SFO is working with the FAA on ways to improve the arrival rate at SFO.