Expected Airport Chaos Is a No-Show; Busiest Day Flies by Smoothly

For San Diego, it was supposed to be the unhappy ending to a charmed Super Bowl fairy tale:

Thousands of football fans rushing to Lindbergh Field after the game, only to get caught in unprecedented traffic jams, caused in part by dozens of rental cars abandoned at curbside. After shuffling through long lines at the airline counters, travelers camp out overnight on the hard terminal floors to wait for their flights home, which are delayed by hours.

But the nightmare never materialized and, by all accounts, San Diego’s airport experienced its busiest day in history with nary a pain, much less a major headache.

Even the 75,000 residents living around the airport were spared major disruption through the night, as only two planes departed Lindbergh between midnight and 6 a.m.

Angry residents had braced themselves for the jet engine revving of many times that number after the San Diego Unified Port District voted recently to suspend the 11:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. prohibition against takeoffs for the night after the Super Bowl.

‘Very Pleasantly Surprised’

“I was very pleasantly surprised that they weren’t flying out all night long, because the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) had said we might need to run out 35 planes an hour,” said Nancy Palmtag, a Loma Portal resident who has tangled with the Port District over airport noise.

In all, airport officials anticipated that 80,000 people would depart from Lindbergh during the 24 hours after Super Bowl XXII--50,000 more than a normal day.

Yet the crowds that flowed through Lindbergh did so without much of the pandemonium on the ground that has become customary during Thanksgiving and Christmas, said M.A. (Bud) McDonald, airport manager.

One of the reasons, said McDonald, is that most of the passengers moving through Lindbergh after the Super Bowl were “tourists” and weren’t accompanied by their families.

Instead of holding up traffic at curbside to wave goodby and gather in hugs and kisses from loved ones, the Super Bowl fans were able to quickly scurry out of taxis and tour buses to get into line for airplane tickets, he said.

McDonald also said he was surprised by the quick departure of private jets from the airport Sunday night. The 160 jets parked on the airport’s short runway for Super Bowl week were fewer than expected, he added.

‘Going Out Nose to Tail’

“I didn’t think we’d have the mass exodus of corporate jets that we did,” McDonald said. “I was here at about 8 p.m. (Sunday) and, man, they were going out of here nose to tail.”

To accommodate the rush, FAA officials received permission to space the departing flights closer together late Sunday and throughout Monday. Normally, they are required to keep 10 miles between departing planes, but that cushion was cut down to 5 miles for the Super Bowl, said Arlen Donner, the FAA’s acting air traffic manager for Lindbergh.

Even with those concessions, there were flight delays, but not nearly as long as the three hours that some airlines had feared.

The average wait late Sunday and Monday was 39 minutes, Donner said. Some flights were delayed as much as an hour by Monday morning, with one scheduled departure set back an hour and 45 minutes, he said.

Evidence of those delays, however, was nowhere to be found on the ground.

Virtually no one slept over in the East and West terminals, as some airlines and airport officials had expected.

Spent Night at Airport

Irene Parker and Cathy Terry, dressed in bright Redskins sweat shirts and hats, were among the few souls who spent the night in the airport before catching an 8 a.m. TWA flight to Washington. The empty airport was not quite the party they expected.

“It’s not a madhouse,” Parker said. “A madhouse is the party we are going to.”

Greg Dietz, a customer service representative for America West Airlines, looked tired at 4 a.m. Monday. He had been working since 4 p.m. Sunday and stayed overnight to handle the post-game crunch. Most airlines kept crews on all night for the rush.

“I was expecting it to be jam-packed with people,” he said. “I thought it was going to be wall-to-wall.”

So, too, did Tony Wong, the beverage and food manager for Host International. Wong said the cafeteria in the East Terminal was ready to stay open until 2 a.m. Monday to accommodate the airport campers.

“Nobody showed up,” Wong said. “All we had was a few Denver fans and that was it. We closed at midnight.”

10 Special Runners Ready

Rental car companies--warned that anxious Super Bowl travelers often ditch their vehicles at terminal curbsides or in parking lots when pressed for time--had 10 special runners ready Sunday night and Monday to spot and move the stray cars.

Yet by Monday afternoon, there hadn’t been even one report of an abandoned car.

And Pat Flynn, city manager of Avis, said that conventional check-ins were going slow for his company, as well as National and Hertz rental cars.

“Now, the check-ins aren’t coming in,” Flynn said. “Instead of the rush coming on Monday for what we anticipated, it looks like for Avis that it is going to be spread out Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.”

After a Monday morning rush, the Lindbergh terminals were fairly tranquil with plenty of parking spaces to be found.

“It’s a little strange, even for a Monday morning,” remarked Harbor Police Officer Robert Mickschl.

Traffic Moved Smoothly

Gerald Reas, the airport’s new land-side transportation coordinator, explained that coordination and planning kept Super Bowl traffic moving smoothly by the terminals.

Tour buses, which could have added to any traffic problem in front of the terminals, were kept from the main part of the airport and instead rerouted to the PSA terminal on Winship Lane, where hundreds of visitors were disgorged and boarded on chartered flights.

In addition, Reas said that an extra number of airport employees and Harbor and San Diego police officers worked Sunday night and Monday to keep the traffic flowing in front of the terminals.

“This place can look worse than it is because if you get a traffic tangle, within five minutes you can have chaos. You can have traffic backed up to Harbor Drive,” Reas said.

The results of such planning weren’t lost on airport regulars anticipating trouble from the Super Bowl.

“The big snag never happened,” said cabby Danny Ryan, after depositing a rider at Lindbergh early Monday. “We thought it would be a big jam. It was very well-planned. It’s incredible.”

Times staff writer Curtis L. Taylor contributed to this story.