Fliers Still Stranded at John Wayne

Carol Simpson, 80, had a perfectly wonderful Christmas, surrounded for the first time in years by her three children and five grandchildren, all gathered at her daughter’s Mission Viejo house to celebrate their matriarch.

Then she tried to go home.

In a wheelchair and, she said ruefully, “not what I used to be,” Simpson was one of tens of thousands of passengers at John Wayne Airport and many more across the country unable to get home to Northern California because of dense fog throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

“It’s a little scary, but we’ll make the best of it,” said Simpson’s daughter, Sharol Zambukos. “We’re going to get our baggage back and just go back home and sit in the sun, instead of the fog.”

With visibility as low as 100 feet at San Francisco Airport on Sunday night, and the weather at San Jose and Oakland airports little better, Simpson probably had the right idea. The murk was so dense in Palo Alto that rescuers had to use sirens and air horns to guide three lost duck hunters to shore.

Before the fog began lifting Monday morning, about 30 United Airlines flights headed for the Bay Area carrying about 3,100 passengers were diverted to the Reno-Tahoe airport in Nevada. Reno’s two largest cab companies sent 50 cabs to the Bay Area, a 220-mile trip with a fare of about $360. All rental cars at the Reno airport were booked Monday morning. Some San Francisco-bound flights were diverted to Monterey and Sacramento, where passengers were put on buses to finish their trips.

In Orange County, that made for a bunch of tired, grumpy passengers.

Of the 14 Southwest Airlines flights from John Wayne Airport to San Jose and Oakland on Sunday night, six never made it, airline spokeswoman Debbie Fabbri said. One landed in Reno and another in Sacramento, forcing passengers to take airline-provided shuttles back home.

By midday Monday, just two of four Southwest flights from Orange County had landed in the Bay Area, but Fabbri said the fog had begun lifting, and airline officials hoped to get through the day with no more than inconvenient delays.

But Sarah and Keith Castello, newly married and eager to get back to their Bay Area jobs, said later may well mean never.

The two waited four hours at the airport Sunday night, deflated from the hassle after a joyous Christmas with Sarah’s parents in Placentia. On Monday they were back to try again. But the big red letters on the airport monitor spelling “DELAYED” next to their flight were almost too much to take.

“We’ll probably give it a couple of hours today, then if it’s still delayed we’ll give up, start looking for car rentals wherever we can find them,” Keith Castello said. “If we can find them. We tried to rent a car last night, but they were all gone. Everyone else had the same idea, I guess.”

Spirits were no higher among passengers stranded in the Bay Area. At the San Francisco Airport, passengers stood in lines that stretched more than 1,000 feet.

As the Christmas travelers waited in long lines for pay phones, many calling family members who had just dropped them off to ask to be picked up again, airline employees struggled to cope.

“It’s just so hard,” airline spokeswoman Fabbri said. “The people, some get very irate. But most are very good about it. They know it’s an act of God. They know that if we could get them there, we would. We just can’t guarantee that today.”

Times wire services contributed to this report.