Runway 28L at SFO, which has been closed since mid-January while construction crews have been making design improvements to two taxiways that should hopefully mean higher safety standards for planes moving around the airport.

San Francisco International Airport has four runway paths with eight total departure and landing runways. However, prevailing wind patterns at SFO dictate that only four of those — two departure runways and two arrival runways — facing north and west, are in use over 95% of the time, and one of those arrival runways, 28L, or "28 Left," has been out of commission for five months.

The reason, as airport officials explained in December, was a project to realign two taxiways, named "Delta" and "Tango," that are used by planes landing on runways 28L and 28R. The previous design had these taxiways intersecting, which creates more potential dangers for aircraft as they move between runways and terminals.

Now, the work is scheduled to be completed by June 21, the airport announced Wednesday. As ABC 7 reports, that 10 days ahead of the deadline date given in January, which was July 1. And officials are saying that after June 21, you won't be able to blame delays at SFO on anything but airline issues and weather.

Diagram shows Runway 28L starting at bottom right, and taxiways D(Delta) and T(Tango) can be seen near the center, crossing in the former design near Terminal 3.

"Construction crews will remove existing taxiways and reconstruct Delta and Tango as separate, non-intersecting taxiways," airport officials previously said. "The new configuration will improve safety and bring the layout of the taxiways up to the latest standards."

The changes come not long after a troubling report last August about air-traffic-controller shortages and widespread close calls at our nation's airports, and after several months of troubling aircraft problems, primarily on Boeing jets, and many of them leaving or arriving at SFO.

The construction work has been causing arrival and landing delays of up to an hour for both domestic and international flights, due to the diminished runway capacity — with only one runway for arrivals and two for departures.

The taxiway improvements cost $55 million and were federally funded. A similar project to improve taxiway Sierra took place in 2017. A project to repave the airport's shortest runway, 1L/19R took place last year.

Photo: David Syphers