Santa Monica Airport’s move to shorten its main runway by 30 percent will also drastically shorten the list of aircraft able to use it.

Roughly 44 percent of the jet flights that use the runway will no longer be able to do so after the work to reduce its length from 5,000 feet to 3,500 feet is complete in early January, according to Suja Lowenthal, senior advisor to the city manager for Santa Monica. Last year, there were 17,338 jet takeoffs and landings at the airport, according to a city report.

Aircraft that will not be able to use the runway – largely charter services planes providing corporate travel, will either have to fly out of other local airports or be switched out for smaller jets that can safely take off and land on the shorter runway.

“We have many companies based here in Santa Monica, West Los Angeles and Playa Vista that are going to have to balance things like how many people to send to conferences versus traveling farther to other local airports,” said Dave Hopkins, chief executive of the Santa Monica Airport Association, an aviation group that is fighting the project.

The shortening work is the first step under an agreement the city of Santa Monica reached earlier this year with the Federal Aviation Administration to shut down the airport completely by the end of 2028.

The Santa Monica Airport Association filed suit in federal district court in Washington, D.C., to try to overturn the agreement; a decision is not expected until well into next year. The association last month won a temporary restraining order against the city, blocking it from proceeding with the runway shortening. But the restraining order was overturned within a week and the project went ahead with construction last month.

Aircraft can continue to use the full 5,000-foot runway length for the next few weeks, Lowenthal said.

But just before Christmas, the airport will shut down completely for 10 days as the runway is shortened. When the airport reopens shortly after New Year’s Day, the runway will be at its new 3,500-foot length.

The runway shortening is not expected to have any impact on propeller aircraft, including prop-jets; last year, according to the city report, there were roughly 67,500 propeller aircraft takeoffs and landings, comprising about three-fourths of all airplane traffic.

Aviation advocates said the runway shortening will hit some airport users hard, primarily those with large jet aircraft that will have to be moved to other air fields.

Hopkins said most will likely relocate their larger aircraft to Van Nuys Airport, Hawthorne Airport or Los Angeles International Airport.

“Many companies that still want to use the airport will be forced to use turbo-props or smaller, lighter jets,” Hopkins said.

Those types of jet aircraft are generally used for short-haul flights to the Bay Area, Las Vegas or Phoenix, he said. Larger aircraft – such as Gulfstream IV jets – capable of flying cross-country or to points east of Chicago, would have to fly out of one of the other airports, forcing the executives and others who use them to travel to those other airports.

Christian Fry, an independent documentary film producer who is also board president of the Santa Monica Airport Association, said it’s likely aircraft charter services will switch out their fleets.

“There will be a period of adjustment – six months or so I would expect – where the various charter services will be trying to find the right mix of aircraft that both comply with the new shorter runway safety guidelines and meet customer demand,” Fry said.

Indeed, that’s what time-share jet service NetJets Inc. of Columbus, Ohio, is doing right now. Spokeswoman Kristyn Wilson said in an email that besides Santa Monica Airport, NetJets also has its own facility at Van Nuys Airport and uses Hollywood Burbank Airport and LAX.

“NetJets is currently reviewing capability at Santa Monica Airport,” Wilson said. “No final decisions have been made about which fleet types we will be operating there.”

Public jet charter service JetSuiteX of Irvine has had to pass on entering Santa Monica Airport altogether, thanks in part to the runway shortening.

After the agreement with the FAA was announced in January, JetSuiteX put on hold plans to launch service from Santa Monica Airport.

JetSuiteX CEO Alex Wilcox in February said the company was in negotiations with the city to try to hammer out an agreement, but the company confirmed that as of last week no agreement had been reached and JetSuiteX still had no service at the airport.

The runway shortening project may also have helped claim another victim: American Flyers, a fuel service and plane maintenance company known in the industry as a fixed-based operator. The Addison, Texas, company, which also provides flight school and training services, vacated its lease in April, according to Lowenthal, the Santa Monica city official.

Calls to American Flyers were not returned. In March, American Flyers President Jill Cole said in an article appearing on the website of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association of Frederick, Md., that the decision was in large part due to Santa Monica city decisions “over the past three years to drive people away from the airport.”

The city decided to take over the fixed-base operator side of American Flyers’ business, awarding a contract to Aeroplex Aerolease Group of Long Beach.

The other fixed-base operator, Plano, Texas-based Atlantic Aviation Corp., remains in operation at the airport. Calls and emails to a company spokeswoman were not returned.