Despite predictions of air travel chaos on day one of government-mandated flight reductions, San Diego International Airport felt almost zen-like on Friday as passengers adjusted to what were expected to be a couple dozen cancellations.
At Terminals 1 and 2, departing passengers glanced up at arrival and departure monitors to find the status of their upcoming flights, and as of late morning Friday, there were few red alerts denoting a canceled flight.
According to FlightAware, an online flight tracking service, a total of 27 arriving and departing flights had been canceled for Friday at the San Diego airport.
Across the country, there were close to 1,000 flight cancellations as of early Friday afternoon, FlightAware data showed.
The canceled flights are the airlines’ response to an order this week from the Federal Aviation Administration to initially cut domestic flight operations by 4% at the nation’s 40 busiest airports due to air traffic controller shortages wrought by the ongoing government shutdown.
Although the order initially dictated a 10% cutback in air travel capacity, the latest edict allows for a ramping up of flight cancellations, with cuts increasing to 6% by Tuesday, 8% by Thursday and then 10% on Nov. 14.
Passengers at San Diego International Airport navigate the line to pass through TSA security screening before heading to their departure gates. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Kelly and Debra Brown, from the Austin area, had arrived at Terminal 1 Friday morning more than four hours early for their afternoon flight back home, just to be extra safe in light of the planned flight cuts. There had been no last-minute adjustments to their Southwest Airlines flight, except for gate changes.
“When we heard the news, we didn’t know if the flight would be canceled and we were trying to figure out if they were going to give us a heads up so we could make an adjustment,” said Kelly Brown, sitting in the lobby of Terminal 1’s pre-security area, which was relatively uncrowded. “But Southwest has been very good and we just followed it on our app.”
His wife had been in San Diego to attend a conference, and the couple stayed longer for a short vacation.
“Coming out to the airport early takes a little of the stress out,” Brown said. “Southwest had given us a chance to switch our flight without any cost but we decided to take a chance.”
Equally unruffled about the air travel cutbacks were Emmanuel and Paige Salmeron, who were on their way to San Francisco for a weekend getaway.
“I saw the news. I was just a little nervous, nothing crazy,” Paige said of their noon flight. “We’re just going on a vacation so if it gets delayed, I figured, it’s no big deal. We weren’t really checking flights ahead of time. You read the news, people get anxious about it and I don’t think it does any good to worry about it. I knew this was starting today but I didn’t think it would be too crazy.”
Among some of the canceled flights Friday out of San Diego were Southwest nonstops to Las Vegas, Oakland and Phoenix, and an Alaska Airlines nonstop to Washington National Airport.
Nicholas Sweitzer and his partner were scheduled to be on the 1 p.m. flight to Washington, D.C., but learned as they were checking out of their San Diego hotel Friday morning that it had been canceled. They had been frantically trying ever since to get on another Alaska flight departing Friday. Sweitzer was nervous because he is scheduled to start a new job first thing Monday.
“Ticketing told us the next flight is at 1 p.m. Monday. Then they offered us a flight that gets in at 1 a.m. tomorrow,” said Sweitzer, who was in town to visit his family. “We kind of expected this might happen at National airport. We knew that the shutdown might have some impact on our travel but we were cautiously optimistic. But clearly it didn’t pan out in our favor.”
Looking ahead to Saturday, FlightAware shows just 16 cancellations in San Diego. Federal officials have warned, though, that the air travel fallout from the government shutdown could worsen in the coming days.
Southwest Airlines, which is San Diego’s single biggest airline, did not provide local cancellation figures, but across 34 of the 117 airports it serves, it said it had reduced its schedule through Monday by 4%. That equates to 120 flights on Friday, under 100 for Saturday, and about 150 for Sunday, the airline said.
San Diegan Thomas Engelhardt was preparing to leave on a flight to Indianapolis to celebrate the 90th birthday of his girlfriend’s mother but said he was never too concerned about a potential disruption to his trip.
“I Googled it and and stayed on top of it,” he said. “And I typically come down early, get a little snack before I get on board and don’t mind getting here two hours early. Hopefully coming back we won’t have an issue either.
“Maybe the government will open back up and things will be smooth.”
As unprecedented as the federally-mandated air travel cutbacks are, there have been days that were far worse in terms of the volume of canceled flights, reported Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
It calculated that Friday is expected to be the 72nd worst day for flight cancellations overall in the U.S. airline market since Jan. 1, 2024. Cirium estimated that Friday’s cancellations for the nation’s airports amounted to just 3% of all flights.