United Airlines has announced it plans to return to Carlsbad\u2019s McClellan-Palomar airport beginning in March with daily flights to Denver and San Francisco.<\/p>\n
United would be the second major airlines making flights in and out of Palomar, after American Airlines initiated twice-daily service in February. The commercial service was opposed by the local group Citizens for a Friendly Airport, which filed a still unresolved lawsuit over noise and environmental concerns.<\/p>\n
The return of United will require approval of a lease with airport operator San Diego County that is scheduled to go to the county Board of Supervisors in January or February.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnited Airlines recently notified County Airports of its interest in offering flights from McClellan Palomar Airport (Palomar) to Denver and San Francisco beginning in March 2026,\u201d Donna Durckel, a county communications officer, said in a written statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn anticipation of its new service, United announced that it would begin pre-selling tickets on Oct. 22 (Wednesday),\u201d Durckel said.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnited is proposing four daily flights from Palomar airport: two to San Francisco (SFO) and two Denver (DEN) using the Embraer 175 (E175) aircraft,\u201d she said. \u201cUnited has indicated the earliest flight is proposed to depart Palomar at 7:30 a.m. and the last flight would return to Palomar Airport at 9:50 p.m.<\/p>\n
The flight times fall within the hours recommended by the airport\u2019s voluntary noise abatement program, she said.<\/p>\n
Dom Betro of the Citizens for a Friendly Airport said the proposed flights would be an unwarranted expansion of the airport.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost egregiously, this expansion ignores the terms of the conditional-use permit authority of the city of Carlsbad, which restricts Palomar Airport use for general aviation purposes only,\u201d Betro said in an email Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis development further ignores the health, safety and quality of life impacts on North County residents, and the real increasing risks to resident lives,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, justice will eventually prevail, as the legal court proceedings reveal the county fa\u00e7ade of deceit and deflection, and restores the protections the county supervisors have failed to insure.\u201d<\/p>\n
United previously provided regular service on its United Express flights between Carlsbad and Los Angeles from 1996 to 2016 with a 30-passenger turboprop aircraft. The flights ceased when the company switched to a new fleet of jets that needed a longer runway.<\/p>\n
County officials have said in the past that to deny an airlines contract could be considered discriminatory by the Federal Aviation Administration, which provides more than 90 percent of the funding for capital improvements at the county\u2019s airports.<\/p>\n
The county could lose millions of dollars in annual funding were a contract not approved, county Director of Airports Jamie Abbott said in January. Also, the FAA could revoke previous funding for what the agency considers the failure to follow the terms of its grants.<\/p>\n
Recent court cases in Los Angeles and Santa Monica have upheld the FAA\u2019s requirement that smaller airports must be available to commercial airlines<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"United Airlines has announced it plans to return to Carlsbad\u2019s McClellan-Palomar airport beginning in March with daily flights…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[15668,16506,16507,16508,15666,74,76,75,13026],"class_list":{"0":"post-19972","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-american-airlines","9":"tag-carlsbad-airport","10":"tag-carlsbad-flights","11":"tag-citizens-for-a-friendly-airport","12":"tag-mcclellan-palomar-airport","13":"tag-san-diego","14":"tag-san-diego-headlines","15":"tag-san-diego-news","16":"tag-united-airlines"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}