The most heavily traveled section of runway at San Francisco International Airport was unexpectedly shut down early Thursday after the discovery of a large pothole, causing a spate of flight delays.
"We are currently making unscheduled repairs to a 12-inch area of Runway 28L right now, which will cause delays for the next few hours," SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel told KQED at 9 a.m. "During that time, we may experience delays similar to those we see during bad weather."
Yakel said the runway would likely reopen by mid-afternoon. About 10 to 12 percent of flights were experiencing delays, he added, averaging about 55 minutes.
The area where the roughly 3-inch deep depression was discovered is the most heavily-traveled section of SFO's entire runway network, Yakel said, noting that over two-thirds of all flights traverse it.
"This is one of the primary runways that's used for landing, so arriving aircraft are really the ones experiencing delays," he said. "Every couple of months we may encounter a kind of an unplanned situation like this. We also repave our entire runways every few years and in between those complete repavings, we do patches of this nature."
Yakel said if a plane had rolled over the depression on takeoff or landing, passengers would have simply felt a "thump."
Runway 1R was also closed during the morning repair and reopened just before noon.
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