SFO Announces 20-Day Closure of Runway 28L in September 2019 for Reconstruction
 

https://sfoconnect.com/about/news/96365-sfo-announces-20-day-closure-runway-28l-september-2019-reconstruction

I heard about this while passing through San Francisco last week. There was an airport spokesperson on the radio (IIRC) saying that they were anticipating high rates of flight cancellation and delay during this period, especially for flights departing later than "early morning". You would think the airport and airlines would be doing whatever is necessary to a avoid this (reducing schedules, building schedules around SJC and OAK...).. Maybe what I heard was ill-informed. Still, sounds like a mess in the making.

It should cause landings to be about as bad as an inclement weather day plus a little bit more, and departures to suffer up to 25%, as compared to good weather ops. Looks like a good period not to be flying via SFO for short domestic hops.

With so much advance notice, the airlines might adjust their SFO schedules with the 28L closure in mind. I agree with my right honourable colleague, Eastbay1K. that the short flights will be most affected. We'll see. I'll be rolling the dice in this period on a flight to Boston.

haha. I wouldn't. When Toronto was doing a lot of construction and shutdowns they acted like everything was perfectly normal when they scheduled the flights, and then cancelled things left and right and had people delayed for hours and days.

That's what airlines have done when JFK did runway construction. They went ahead and padded flights with insane travel times so for example JFK-RDU which is 431 miles was blocked at 2hr35.

I wonder if AS will preemptively move several non-Airbus ops a day to OAK. it did plenty of this during the past winter.

I have already booked a trip to / from SFO for September (arriving from LHR on Sept 14, flying back on Sept 21) so will keep an eye on this. But I assume the impact on long haul flights will be minor.