Market notes
On chartering from San Francisco
The Bay Area is four airports pretending to be one, and treating them interchangeably is the most common and most expensive mistake in booking Bay Area charter. San Francisco International has four runways, the longest 10L/28R at 3,618 m, and exactly one general aviation FBO: Signature Flight Support at 1052 North Access Road, running 24 hours with three hangars of roughly 24,000 sq ft that accommodate aircraft up to G550 and Global Express size. One FBO at an airport this busy means the ramp is the scarce resource during major conferences.
San Jose Mineta is the answer more often than customers expect. Two parallel 3,353 m runways, both Atlantic Aviation and Signature on the field, and a location that is 20 minutes from Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino rather than an hour. For anyone whose meetings are on the Peninsula or in the South Bay, the ground time saved routinely exceeds any flight time advantage SFO offers, and the competitive FBO market keeps handling quotes honest.
Hayward Executive and Oakland cover the East Bay from opposite ends of the size scale. Hayward has runways of 5,694 ft and 3,107 ft, no airline traffic and fast turnarounds, which makes it excellent for turboprops, light jets and many midsize aircraft, and unsuitable for heavy metal. Oakland has a 3,206 m main runway plus a 1,894 m general aviation runway and hosts KaiserAir and Signature. Its real value shows up in summer, when marine-layer fog produces holds at SFO that Oakland and San Jose frequently avoid entirely.
One operational detail catches out international arrivals. General aviation customs processing at SFO runs on published daytime hours with restrictions on the number of persons per aircraft and on maximum weight. A Gulfstream landing from Tokyo at 23:00 is not a routine event there. Operators either plan the arrival inside the processing window or select a field with wider general aviation clearance, and the choice is usually made when the trip is built rather than on the day.
