Despite a wave of flight cancellations rippling across the country, Sacramento International Airport remained calm and uncrowded late Saturday morning.
Inside Terminal A, travelers breezed through ticketing lines that held no more than half a dozen people, and there were no signs of frustration over delays that travelers have displayed elsewhere.
On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered air carriers to ultimately reduce flights by 10% at 40 high traffic airports across the country because of the federal government shutdown and staffing shortages in air traffic control.
Saturday started with some uncertainty for Sacramento resident Lauren Fong, who said her original flight around noon was canceled, but she was quickly re-booked on a 2:30 p.m. departure to Dallas where she will connect to a plane to Chengdu, China.
Fong said she didn’t know whether the cancellation was related to the FAA directive.
She arrived at the airport about three hours ahead of her flight, unwilling to risk missing a much-anticipated visit to the renowned Chengdu Panda Reserve, home to the world’s last population of giant pandas in the wild.
Sacramento resident Lauren Fong checks in luggage and reviews her boarding passes at Sacramento International Airport on Saturday.
For Irma Perez, 78, who was returning home to Turlock with her daughter and son after a family trip to Pennsylvania, the day’s flight experience was unexpectedly smooth.
“There were a lot of people (at the Atlanta airport), but everything was so well organized,” Perez said. “They were calling by the letter, so it made it easy. I would hate to be standing in long lines.”
Her daughter Elsa Cordova, a project engineer for a construction company, said the family’s Delta flight was delayed about 30 minutes in Atlanta — “not a big deal,” she said. The airline’s app alerted her to the delay before they reached the gate.
Flight tracking website FlightAware showed there were 125 flight cancellations at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, but neither Perez nor Cordova could recall seeing or overhearing any passenger complaints.
Also arriving on the flight from Atlanta were Gold River residents Andrew and Arlene Garcia. They had just returned from a weeklong vacation in Peru. Like the Perez family, they described their flight’s delay as brief.
The Delta flight crew made the wait easier: “Before we landed in Sacramento, they came down the aisle handing out extra snacks. My wife got an apple juice.”
At a table near the Starbucks in Terminal A, Vacaville resident Elbert Townsell settled in for a long wait before his red-eye flight to Colombia. The retired Army veteran and former sheriff’s deputy said he intentionally arrived early because he feared possible slowdowns later in the day.
“My daughter dropped me off,” he said. “It’s expensive to get here by Uber, so I said, ‘Bring me early, and I’ll just hang out for a bit.’”
Townsell, who spends half the year in Cali, Colombia — the “Salsa Capital of the World” — said he’s learned to roll with travel uncertainty. “If my flight gets canceled, I’ll just have my daughter come back and get me,” he said. “Traveling is my new religion. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
Concerned that flight cancellations might affect his trip, Vacaville resident Elbert Townsell arrived at Sacramento International Airport almost 12 hours ahead of his flight on Saturday.
As the nation’s airlines have cut flights, they issued public statements citing the FAA’s directive to cut flights to maintain safe airspace operations. American Airlines said it supports the order, but it urged Congress and the White House to “reach an immediate resolution to end the shutdown.”
Delta, meanwhile, said it expects to operate “the vast majority” of its schedule, including international flights, while minimizing customer disruptions. Both airlines are allowing travelers to change or cancel affected trips without penalty.
Saturday morning appeared more like a lazy weekday morning at SMF — plenty of curbside pickup spaces and ticketing agents offering extra attention — than the frontline of a nationwide transportation crunch.
Even so, a dozen travelers said they were keeping an eye out for alerts before they headed to the airport. Federal transportation officials on Friday cut 4% of flights at the 40 directly affected airports and were expected to gradually increase that to 10% by late next week, if the government shutdown continues.