San Carlos Airport serves general aviation on the San Francisco Peninsula, operating a single runway that handles private planes, flight schools, and charter operations. The airport occupies a strip of land between the hills and the Bay in San Mateo County, one of several small airports that dot the Bay Area's suburban landscape. Its proximity to the tech corridor that stretches from San Mateo to San Jose has made it a convenient facility for executives and engineers who prefer to avoid the traffic of San Francisco International Airport. The airport also serves as a base for aerial tours and flight training, activities that take advantage of the Bay Area's generally favorable flying conditions.

The airport has seen its share of incidents on its primary runway. On September 2, 2010, a Beechcraft Queen Air crashed into a lagoon at Oracle's Redwood Shores headquarters shortly after takeoff from runway 30, killing all three occupants. Seven years later, on October 20, 2017, a Cirrus SR-22 overran the end of the same runway during takeoff, crashing through a fence and onto Skyway Road. In that incident, the two occupants suffered only minor injuries. Both accidents underscored the challenges of operating from a short general aviation runway surrounded by development, where the margin for error during takeoff and landing is measured in hundreds of feet rather than thousands.

The airport code remains the facility's most famous feature, a three-letter coincidence that perfectly captures the Bay Area's tendency to collapse technology and everyday life into the same geography. Pilots filing flight plans to SQL are unknowingly invoking a database query language that generates trillions of dollars in economic activity. The irony deepens when you consider that the airport's neighbor, Oracle, built its entire business on SQL technology. But the code came first, a bureaucratic designation assigned by the FAA to a small Peninsula airstrip that happened to sit in the path of a revolution that had not yet begun.