Land on the side of safety

Last Thursday, a Boeing 737 taxiing toward its gate on Los Angeles International Airport’s north field narrowly missed another commercial jet that was taking off, with perhaps as little as 50 feet separating hundreds of passengers from disaster. It was only the latest frightening incident at a badly outdated airport that has one of the highest rates of such “incursions” in the country.

What did airport commissioners do to solve this problem? They called Monday for yet another in a seemingly endless series of studies.

Opposition from neighboring communities has stalled expansion or modernization of LAX for more than a decade, creating a situation that is becoming increasingly dangerous as air traffic rises and commercial jets grow too big for the airport’s narrowly spaced runways.

The two parallel runways on the south field are undergoing a $330-million face-lift that will add a central taxiway and push the runways 55 feet farther apart. There’s nearly universal agreement from airport experts that similar work is needed for safety reasons on the north field -- but that could involve moving the northernmost runway anywhere from 100 to 600 feet closer to Westchester, where residents and their political representatives are rigidly opposed to the idea.

Modernization of the north field was one of the most hotly contested portions of the 2004 master plan for LAX, which was scrapped last year to settle a lawsuit from the airport’s neighbors. As part of the settlement, the airport agency agreed to perform further studies of the issue, even though it had been extensively studied before the plan was finalized. Five more studies were commissioned from a range of experts, including consulting firms and a panel of airport managers. All agreed that the existing configuration is unacceptable, yet local residents are still crying foul, saying the studies were biased because they were done by people with vested interests in the airline industry. So airport commissioners Monday called for a sixth study, this time by the NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

Residents and politicians will have a hard time convincing anyone that NASA has a pro-airline bias if, as expected, it concludes that the north field should be reconfigured. Yet no amount of scientific evidence will prompt them to accept the project. At a certain point, L.A. political leaders are going to have to stop putting off a decision and start protecting the flying public.