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> they have a troublesome airport

What is troublesome about SFO? I’m not a pilot (or in any way connected to flying except as a passenger) so airports are basically a black box to me.



The two runways that run in parallel are too close to each other to land side-by-side in bad weather (because they only allow using Visual aka VFR landings).

"SFO operates on two sets of parallel runways. On fair weather days, SFO can accommodate approximately 60 arrivals per hour. During periods of low visibility, current FAA safety regulations allow aircraft to arrive side-by-side only if runways are at least 4,300 feet apart."

https://www.flysfo.com/about/airport-operations/policies-reg....


There's a bunch of reasons but it's primarily the popularity of the airport combined with the runway layout and the noise abatement procedures all made worse by the Bay's weather.

SFO has two pairs of parallel runways and the pairs are very close together, with the runways in the 28L/28R pair only 750 feet apart. That's really close for an A350 with a giant 200ft wingspan and the noise abatement prevents the use of a standard step down approach where the pilots have much better visibility.


For comparison, at LAX the typical parallel landing runways 24R and 25L are around a mile (~5000 feet) apart.


There is little to no actual noise abatement at sfo for residents living around there, especially during inclement weather.


https://www.flysfo.com/about/community-noise/noise-office/ma...

But yeah it all goes out the window in poor weather.




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