Bay Area airports not seeing mass flight cancellations, despite global impact of omicron variant

So far, the Bay Area appears unscathed by reported mass flight cancellations around the world, fueled by airline staffing shortages and concerns over the omicron variant, according to data provided by the region’s three major airports.

Out of the three major Bay Area airports, only San Francisco International Airport reported any flight cancellations on Christmas Eve. A spokesman for the airport said 36 flights were canceled as of 10:30 a.m., to go along with 63 delays. The Oakland and San Jose airports reported zero cancellations by midday on Christmas Eve, and spokespeople told this news organization there don’t appear to be any on the horizon.

As for San Francisco, the airport’s duty manager Anthony Nguyen said the number of cancellations “is not alarmingly high or out of scope.” On Thursday, 25 flights were cancelled and 290 were delayed, but some of those were weather-related, he said.

“Looking at the lobby, it’s just business as usual right now,” Nguyen said during an interview Friday morning.

This week, the Washington Post reported that more than 3,000 flights were cancelled around the world, due to concerns over the fast-spreading omicron variant. The pandemic has caused staffing shortages in the airline industry since early 2020 when COVID-19 went global, and United Airlines cited staffing concerns after cancelling nearly 250 flights on Friday and Saturday.

“The nationwide spike in omicron cases this week has had a direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation,” United said in a statement. “As a result, we’ve unfortunately had to cancel some flights and are notifying impacted customers in advance of them coming to the airport.”

In San Francisco, 21 of the 36 cancelled flights were United Airlines, and seven were from Delta. Alaska Airlines cancelled five flights, Nguyen said.

While some travelers canceled holiday plans because of rising case numbers, many others kept to their vacations during some of the year’s busiest travel days. The Transportation Security Administration said it expects to screen nearly 30 million people from Dec. 20 through Jan. 3, compared with nearly 44 million during the last holiday season before the pandemic. A spokeswoman for the Oakland International Airport said as of last week, 2021 airline traffic was at 93 percent of its total for 2019.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.