The Federal Aviation Administration has put three San Diego-area airports on its official "hot spot" list, flagging San Diego International, Montgomery-Gibbs Executive and McClellan-Palomar in Carlsbad as places where runway incursions or ground collisions are more likely.
Those alerts now show up right on the airports' own diagrams, highlighting specific runway and taxiway intersections that call for extra vigilance from pilots, vehicle drivers and controllers.
"An 'airport surface hot spot' is a location on an aerodrome movement area with a history or potential risk of collision or runway incursion," the FAA explains. Its latest hot spot table assigns numbered HS markers at each of the three fields and spells out where the problem spots are, according to the FAA.
Where The Risk Shows Up
At McClellan-Palomar (CRQ), the FAA notes a holding position where "Large Jets may obscure twr visibility of small aircraft" and a second hot spot where aircraft exit Runway 24 onto Taxiway A4. Montgomery-Gibbs (MYF) lists three HS locations clustered around its runway and taxiway layout, and San Diego International (SAN) carries an HS tag at the Taxiway J and H intersection.
Those short, technical notes are laid out in the FAA's hot spot publication so pilots and controllers can review them before taxiing, according to the FAA. It is not bedtime reading, but it is meant to keep everyone on the ground from getting too close for comfort.
Palomar's Comeback Collides With Safety Concerns
The timing at McClellan-Palomar is touchy. The county says United Express is set to begin flights from Carlsbad on March 30, 2026, and American has already restarted limited commercial routes. That growing lineup of scheduled jets is the same expansion that prompted residents and advocacy groups to challenge the county's leasing decisions in court.
Critics argue that more traffic on a charted hot spot should give officials pause, especially with nearby neighborhoods under the flight paths. "Do not sign this contract," Citizens for a Friendly Airport president Hope Nelson told NBC 7 San Diego during a county supervisors' hearing.
FAA Tracking And Safety Upgrades
Separately from the hot spot charts, the FAA keeps a Runway Incursion Mitigation inventory that tracks locations with repeated incursions. In the agency's December 18, 2025 list, both McClellan-Palomar and Montgomery-Gibbs appear among the sites being watched for mitigation work. The file lays out cumulative and peak incursion counts that help the agency decide which trouble spots get fixed first, according to the FAA.
At the same time, the FAA is rolling out new tools with names only an engineer could love, such as Approach Runway Verification and a Runway Incursion Device, to give controllers better alerts about who is on which runway and when. The goal is to cut the odds of a ground collision, according to the FAA.
What Neighbors And Travelers Should Watch
For airline passengers, the hot spot markers do not change how you get through the terminal or board a flight. The impact is behind the scenes, where certain taxi routes and holding positions now officially demand slower, more careful moves and extra-clear radio readbacks.
For people living around the airports, the designation blends safety worries with long-running quality of life complaints. The county has said that a voluntary noise abatement program will be part of the new service leases, a promise that did not ease concerns among opponents at the supervisors' hearing, NBC 7 San Diego reported.
Legal Fight And Next Steps
Opponents have taken the battle over Palomar into court, claiming the county did not fully evaluate environmental and community impacts under California's CEQA law. Citizens for a Friendly Airport has filed lawsuits, and the City of Carlsbad has asked to join litigation over the leases, according to KPBS.
Upcoming court hearings and any appeals could decide whether the planned commercial service moves ahead on schedule while safety mitigation projects and chart updates continue in the background.
FAA hot spot labels do not shut down flights, but they are a blunt public reminder that the most dangerous part of aviation often happens on the ground, not in the air. As smaller fields like Palomar see a renewed commercial footprint, regulators, airlines, pilots and community leaders are left juggling two jobs at once: driving down incursion risk on the ramp and hashing out what kind of flying North County is willing to live with.
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