President Joe Biden and Jill Biden will be in the Santa Barbara area on Tuesday, a VIP temporary flight restriction (TFR) issued by the FAA indicates. It bans most aircraft from the area between S.B. and Santa Maria that are not in service to either the Secret Service or the Office of the President of the United States. This would follow Biden’s historic appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which kicked off on Monday, as he hands the party torch to Kamala Harris, his vice-president and former California Senator and Attorney General.
Janene Scully, who reports on North County for Noozhawk, broke the story on Sunday evening that the Bidens were coming to town, speculating that they were headed for an 8,000-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley owned by Joe Kiani that Hunter Biden had visited last year. Kiani, whose Orange County-based company Masimo invented a pulse oximeter that uses light to show oxygen saturation in the blood accurately, is a member of Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and also a generous donor to Biden’s campaigns and Democratic PACs.
The President’s airplane is generally a Boeing 747, an aircraft that can barely manage the relatively short runway at Santa Barbara Airport (SBA), although any plane carrying the president is dubbed Air Force One. Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the other hand, has the second longest runway in the Department of Defense; it’s about three times the length a 747 requires.