Many flights scheduled to fly in and out of Fresno get canceled. Here’s why
UPDATE: As of Friday morning, five more flights that were scheduled to depart Fresno Yosemite International Airport were canceled and two others delayed. Those flights are operated by SkyWest Airlines.
However, most SkyWest flights scheduled to arrive to Fresno on Friday morning still are projected to land on time.
But there are two lengthy delays among SkyWest arrival flights to Fresno: United flight 5299 from San Francisco and United 5670 from Los Angeles. Both have been pushed back at least two hours.
ORIGINAL STORY: Seven of 17 flights that were scheduled to land sometime after 6 p.m. Thursday at Fresno Yosemite International Airport ended up getting canceled.
And another two flights were delayed at least two hours and weren’t expected to arrive in Fresno until past midnight.
The cancellations and delays into Fresno were all connected to a server outage affecting SkyWest Airlines, the company said Thursday.
“SkyWest is experiencing an internal server outage and our IT teams are working to resolve the issue. We apologize to customers for the inconvenience and are working to resume normal operations as quickly as possible,” SkyWest said in a statement Thursday.
By about 9 p.m., SkyWest issued another statement and said the server outage issue was fixed and offered hope that flights scheduled for Friday would not be impacted.
“SkyWest experienced an internal technical issue resulting in approximately 700 flight cancellations before the issue was resolved Thursday evening,” SkyWest said in a statement sent to The Fresno Bee. “We apologize to customers for the inconvenience; we are working to minimize the impact on Friday’s schedule and to return to normal operations as quickly as possible.”
SkyWest is a regional airline that operates flights on behalf of many of the nation’s largest air carriers, including American, Alaska, Delta, Frontier and United.
SkyWest controls at least eight flights when flying out of Fresno.
And many flights coming into Fresno’s airport also are operated by SkyWest, including nonstop flights arriving from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Seattle.
The only SkyWest-operated flights still scheduled to make it to Fresno on Thursday night/Friday morning are: Alaska Airlines flight 3332 from Seattle (12:20 a.m. expected arrival after it was originally scheduled to land at 9:58 p.m.) and United Airlines flight 4644 from Chicago O’Hare International Airport (2:20 a.m. expected arrival after it was originally scheduled to land at 10:35 p.m.).
Flights not controlled by SkyWest and scheduled to land in Fresno on Thursday night still were projected to arrive, including the Southwest 5083 flight from Las Vegas, Alaska 3388 flight from San Diego and the Allegiant 229 flight from Las Vegas.
It is unclear how the canceled flights would impact the departing flights out of FAT on Friday morning. Some of the planes that arrive in the evening often are used to fly out first thing in the morning.
As of 8 p.m. Thursday, there was only one flight scheduled to fly out of Fresno on Friday morning that was already canceled: United 5426 to Los Angeles.
A spokesperson for the Fresno Yosemite International Airport advised passengers to monitor their upcoming flight status online or, if need be, call the airline.
This story was originally published October 21, 2021 at 8:07 PM.
