San Francisco International Airport

San Francisco

San Francisco International Airport is an international airport in San Mateo County, 13 miles (21 km) south of Downtown San Francisco, California. It has flights to points throughout North America and is a major gateway to Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Australasia.

SFO is the largest airport in the San Francisco Bay Area and the second busiest in California, after Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). In 2017 it was the seventh-busiest airport in the United States and the 24th-busiest in the world by passenger count. It is the fifth-largest hub for United Airlines, which operates out of Terminal 3 and the International Terminal. SFO functions as United's primary Trans-Pacific gateway. It is a major maintenance hub for United Airlines and houses the SFO Museum that was created in 1980 and was the first museum in an international airport. It also serves as a hub for Alaska Airlines, which operates in Terminal 2.

The airport is owned and operated by the City and County of San Francisco and has a San Francisco mailing address, although it is outside of San Francisco in unincorporated San Mateo County. Between 1999 and 2004 the San Francisco Airport Commission operated city-owned SFO Enterprises, Inc., to oversee its business purchases and operations of ventures.

Earthquake and planned Bay fill expansion

The airport closed following the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989, reopening the following morning. Minor damage to the runways was quickly repaired.

In 1989, a master plan and Environmental Impact Report were prepared to guide development over the next two decades. During the boom of the 1990s and the dot-com boom SFO became the sixth busiest airport in the world, but since 2001, when the boom ended, SFO has fallen out of the top 20. United Express turboprops were scheduled 60 minutes apart to shuttle connecting passengers between SFO and nearby San Jose International Airport during the boom era.[citation needed] United Groundlink supplemented this service with alternate 60-minute frequencies.

A $2.4 billion International Terminal Complex opened in December 2000, replacing Terminal 2 (known then as the International Terminal). The new International Terminal includes the San Francisco Airport Commission Aviation Museum and Library and the Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum, as part of the SFO Museum.[46] SFO's long-running museum exhibition program, now called SFO Museum, won unprecedented accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums in 1999.

SFO experiences delays (known as flow control) in overcast weather when only two of the airport's four runways can be used at a time because the centerlines of the parallel runway sets (01R/01L and 28R/28L) are only 750 feet (230 m) apart. Airport planners advanced proposals that would extend the airport's runways by adding up to 2 square miles (1,300 acres; 520 ha) of fill to San Francisco Bay and increase their separation by up to 4,300 feet (1,300 m) in 1998 to accommodate arrivals and departures during periods of low visibility. Other proposals included three floating runways, each approximately 12,000 feet (3,700 m) long and 1,000 feet (300 m) wide.[48] The airport would be required by law to restore Bay land elsewhere in the Bay Area to offset the fill. One mitigation proposal would have the airport purchase and restore the 29,000 acres (12,000 ha) of South Bay wetlands owned by Cargill Salt to compensate for the new fill.[49][50] These expansion proposals met resistance from environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, fearing damage to the habitat of animals near the airport, recreational degradation (such as windsurfing) and bay water quality.

Senators introduced SB 1562 on February 18, 2000, to bypass the environmental impact study that would normally be required for a large project like the proposed Bay fill and mitigation in order to expedite construction. SB 1562 was signed into law on September 29, 2000. A study commissioned by the airport and released in 2001 stated that alternatives to airport expansion, such as redirecting traffic to other regional airports (Oakland or San Jose), capping the number of flights, or charging higher landing fees at selected times of the day 2001 would result in higher fares and poorer service. However, the proposal to build new runways on Bay fill continued to attract opposition from environmental groups and local residents. The airport expansion cost was estimated at US $1,400,000,000 (equivalent to $2,330,000,000 in 2021) in 1998, rising to US$2,200,000,000 (equivalent to $3,580,000,000 in 2021) a year later, including an estimate of US $200,000,000 (equivalent to $325,000,000 in 2021) for the Cargill wetlands purchase and restoration.

The delays during poor weather (among other reasons) caused some airlines, especially low-cost carriers such as Southwest Airlines, to shift all of their service from the airport to Oakland and San Jose. However, Southwest eventually returned to SFO in 2007.

BART to SFO

A long-planned extension of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to the airport opened on June 22, 2003, allowing passengers to board BART trains at the international or domestic terminals and have direct rail transportation to downtown San Francisco, Oakland, and the East Bay. On February 24, 2003, the AirTrain people mover opened, transporting passengers between terminals, parking lots, the BART station, and the rental car center on small automatic trains.