Bad weather and landing equipment scheduled for repair forced Santa Barbara Airport passengers to be rerouted and rescheduled over the weekend.

On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration took the airport’s instrument landing system offline because an antenna was malfunctioning. The part was ordered and was expected to come in Monday, airport director Karen Ramsdell said.

Ramsdell said she wasn’t sure how many flights were diverted to other airports over the weekend, and that the lag time waiting for the part to come in and the low fog and cloud cover created a “perfect storm” for flights, keeping them from leaving or landing on the runway.

“When you have weather where the clouds are 800 feet above the ground and the commercial aircraft needs that system to land … it was the worst possible time for that to happen,” Ramsdell said.

She said she didn’t know exactly how many flights had been rerouted, but that passengers were bused down to Los Angeles to catch flights as well.

Airport officials will need to do flight checks with the instruments, but Ramsdell said she expects the instrument landing system to be up and running by Thursday.

— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at lcooper@noozhawk.com.