Bay Area airports near 'normal' operations after hundreds of delays Saturday

Kyle Martin, The Mercury News on Nov 14, 2026

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Hundreds of flights and even more passengers suffered continued delays and cancellations at airports across the Bay Area through Saturday evening following Friday’s nationwide ground stop that stranded passengers for hours.

At San Francisco International Airport, 283 flights were delayed and 253 others cancelled through Saturday afternoon as of about 4:05 p.m., according to Russ Mackey, SFO’s airport duty manager.

“The biggest thing is they may encounter longer lines at the check in counters due to people still resolving some of their canceled flights from yesterday’s outage,” Mackey told Bay Area News Group. “Outside of that, we are departing as normal. Make sure you continually check the status of your flight before heading out to the airport.”

This followed a tumultuous four hours the day before, when the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights starting at about 1 p.m., marking the second-longest grounding of flights in American airspace. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Friday blamed the ground stop on “instability” in key communications systems.

Mackey on Saturday cautioned travelers to plan on extra time at the ticket counters through the weekend.

While the airport is “back to normal operations,” Mackey added that airlines were still resolving cancellations and delays with passengers into Saturday evening.

“I would expect in the next couple of days for the airlines to be caught up on their schedules and to have resolved the cancellations,” he said.

East Bay travelers flying out of Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, suffered 20 cancellations and 58 delays of 30 minutes or more by about 3:20 p.m., OAK spokesperson Kaley Skantz told Bay Area News Group.

Meanwhile, South Bay travelers flying out of San José Mineta International Airport saw 17 canceled flights by Saturday evening “and most flights have experienced some delays,” according to Ana Maria State, SJC’s assistant public information manager.

When asked when the public could expect delays and cancellations to subside, Skantz said “it’s hard to say at this time because it’s all dependent on airline schedules and staffing as everything normalizes.”

“We are hopeful for continued resumption of normal operations,” she added.“We expect operations to normalize as the weekend continues.”