Stockton plan for airport name doesn’t fly with SFO

The Stockton airport is going to keep calling itself the Stockton airport, for a little while longer.

A proposal to change the name of the Stockton airport to the “San Francisco-Stockton Regional Airport” was postponed indefinitely on Tuesday, after the folks in charge of christening things in Stockton received a sharply worded letter of protest from the director of San Francisco International Airport.

“We formally object,” said the letter from SFO Airport Director Ivar Satero to the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors. “The new name being considered by Stockton ... is likely to cause confusion or mistake among the public.”

If those words weren’t enough to break off the budding advances from Stockton, Satero added: “A relationship or connection between the two airports ... does not exist.”

Stockton Metropolitan Airport, 83 miles from San Francisco, was seeking to follow the example of other U.S. airports (Hollywood-Burbank, Reno-Tahoe, FresnoYosemite, MelbourneOrlando) that have — for marketing purposes — hitched their names to more famous destinations located, in some cases, a long way away.

But SFO was having none of it.

“The new name ... suggests to consumers that the Stockton Metropolitan Airport is closer to San Francisco than it actually is or that there is great and readier availability of transportation options between Stockton and San Francisco than there actually are,” Satero wrote.

Also weighing in on the Stockton-vs.-San Francisco tiff was Rep. Jackie Speier (D-San Mateo), who told the San Joaquin County supervisors in a letter that she objected to the name change, too. She did call it a “creative and audacious approach” to selling plane tickets to Stockton, but said there were “less confusing ways to achieve your goal.”

Harry Mavrogenes, the Stockton Metropolitan Airport director who had been pushing for the new name after a marketing study indicated it was the thing to do, said he now supported the decision by the supervisors to postpone voting on it. The whole purpose behind the 11-syllable “San Francisco-Stockton Regional Airport,” he said, was to make the great city of Stockton a little more recognizable. To that end, the airport naming proposal had done its part.

“We’re very pleased that so much light got shined” on Stockton, Mavrogenes said. “We’ll see where this goes. We’ll make sure we do all our homework.”