Fog upends holiday travel at San Diego airport. Hundreds of flights delayed in past 3 days

Just as the holiday travel season gets underway, daily dense fog here has played havoc with passengers’ flight plans in and out of San Diego International Airport. And the potential for more disruption remains in play.

Over the past three days, nearly 800 flights coming into and leaving the airport were delayed, according to the flight tracking service FlightAware.

While the National Weather Service is seeing signs that lowered visibility from fog may be moving inland, there remains the possibility of a late-night advisory.

“We think closer to the Interstate15 corridor we may see areas of dense fog tonight, but there’s still the question of when it becomes widespread enough for it to be an issue,” said Casey Oswant, a lead forecaster with the National Weather Service, on Friday. “The fog can be kind of finicky, but now most of the dense fog has dissipated from the coast, so we need to see dense fog observed along the coast before we pull the trigger on an advisory.”

By early evening, there were only low clouds emerging near the coast, although dense fog could still form overnight, said National Weather Service meteorologist Brandt Maxwell.

It’s still too early to say exactly where there may be fog, although it could be most prevalent slightly inland, east of Interstate 5, as opposed to west of the freeway, which was the case Thursday night, Maxwell said.

San Diego airport officials are forecasting that as many as 1.3 million people will fly in and out of the airport over an 18-day holiday period that began Thursday. Some of the busiest times at the airport are expected to be Friday through Monday. The airport posted a travel alert Friday morning on social media advising passengers to be “aware we’re experiencing some flight delays due to fog. Check with your airline before leaving for the airport.”

Visibility could be as low as 1 mile Friday evening as a result of fog, Oswant said, but that’s not nearly as bad as Thursday night when visibility dropped to just a quarter-mile around the airport at 8 p.m. It later fell to below a quarter-mile up until 4 a.m. Friday, she added.