Fleet Week Brought Two Days of FAA Ground Delays to SFO, and the Air Show Has One Day Left

The FAA held flights bound for San Francisco International Airport at their departure airports on Friday, October 9, and again on Saturday, October 10, as the San Francisco Fleet Week air show and low clouds cut the airport’s arrival rate. Sunday, October 11, is the last scheduled day of the show.

Friday was the worse day. By that evening 457 flights at SFO had been delayed and eight canceled, according to flight tracking by the San Francisco Chronicle.

What the FAA’s advisories show

The FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center announced Friday’s ground delay program at 5:19 a.m. Pacific time. It covered arrivals from 8:30 a.m. to 10:59 p.m., capped SFO at 36 arrivals an hour for the first nine hours, and gave the reason as “air show.”

The same advisory listed Runway 28R for arrivals and Runways 1L and 1R for departures. At that point the FAA expected an average delay of 58 minutes and a maximum of two hours.

The picture changed in the afternoon. A revised program issued at 3:35 p.m. ran until 11:59 p.m. and recoded the cause as staffing, with a “staffing trigger” from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The maximum assigned delay rose to 601 minutes, just over 10 hours, while the average stayed at 57 minutes.

That revision also said the airport would switch to landing on the 28 runways and taking off from the 1 runways once the show ended. The FAA canceled the program at 10:11 p.m., saying its objectives had been met.

Neither advisory says how many controllers were short or why the staffing problem fell in the evening hours.

Saturday: low clouds, then the show

Saturday’s trouble began before the air show did. From 7:22 a.m. the Command Center warned of 30 to 45 minute release delays for SFO flights departing from nearby facilities.

A second ground delay program followed at about 9:15 a.m., this time for low ceilings, holding SFO at 36 arrivals an hour until 6:59 p.m. The FAA’s proposal noted that the expected clearing time “continues to get pushed back” and planned a reduced rate for Fleet Week from 11 a.m.

Saturday’s program was milder than Friday’s, with an average delay of 29 minutes and a maximum of 106. The FAA canceled it early, at 3:04 p.m. AeroCorner found no published count of Saturday’s delayed flights at the time of writing.

Fog also shaped the show itself. The Navy’s Blue Angels cut their Friday routine short because of poor visibility over the bay, the Chronicle reported, and flew again on Saturday.

How a ground delay program works

A ground delay program is the FAA’s tool for an airport that can accept fewer arrivals than airlines have scheduled. Rather than let jets take off and circle near San Francisco, the Command Center gives each SFO-bound flight a departure slot and keeps it on the ground at its origin until then.

These programs reached well beyond California. Both days covered departures from every air route traffic control center in the contiguous United States, plus Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton in Canada.

So a traveler in Boston or Atlanta could sit at the gate because of fog and an air show over San Francisco Bay. That is the point of the tool: the wait happens at the gate instead of in a holding pattern.

Staffing as a cause is not new. Controller shortages were also behind the Northeast cancellations in August.

SFO also has less slack than it did a year ago. Since March 31, the FAA no longer allows side-by-side visual approaches to its closely spaced parallel runways in clear weather, cutting the maximum arrival rate from 54 to about 36 an hour, Aerospace Global News reported, citing the FAA.

What to expect on Sunday

The FAA’s 2026 military airshow notice lists the San Francisco Fleet Week Air Show for October 9 to 11, with the Blue Angels, the Air Force F-22 Raptor demonstration and the Marine Corps F-35B demonstration teams.

As of early Sunday morning, the FAA had not issued a program for SFO for the day. Travelers flying in or out on Sunday afternoon should check their flight status with the airline before leaving for the airport.