Meadowlark: On Collision Course With Urban Sprawl?

“Look, there goes another one!” screamed Chris Cleeland as a Yellow Cab slowly motored across the Meadowlark Airport runway and off into the airport parking lot, where the driver stopped, adjusted her sunglasses and lit a cigarette.

“You see what I mean?” said Cleeland, co-owner and manager of Sunset Aviation, who for eight years has fought to keep neighborhood traffic from using the airport as a shortcut to Warner Avenue.

But at this offbeat, 1940s-vintage airfield stuck smack in the heart of suburban Huntington Beach, errant taxis are a fact of life for the 130 or so pilots who call Meadowlark their home away from home. So are the runway lights that haven’t worked in six months. So are the potholes on the tie-down ramps.

Meadowlark Airport has been teetering on the brink of extinction for so long that pilots have learned to simply make do. But three accidents within the space of a few weeks last month--one airplane plowed into a nearby office building, one crashed into a flight school and a third hit a pickup truck--have raised new questions about whether this slice of nostalgia can withstand the pressures of an increasingly urban environment.

Hazard to Homes Claimed

Once again, airport neighbors are writing letters urging the city to close the airport--something the city may not even have authority to do--while city officials debate whether the short, narrow landing strip paved more than 40 years ago now represents a hazard to the tract homes, liquor stores and office buildings that have sprouted up around it.

Though there are no fatalities on record at Meadowlark, the seven planes that have crashed there over the past five years have made contact with at least two houses, a mobile home and a private office. All of the structures, almost miraculously, were unoccupied.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg thing,” explained Rich Barnard, assistant to the city manager. “Do you anticipate a possible crash of some sort that’s going to involve people’s lives, and do something about it, or do you wait until afterward?”

Yet Meadowlark pilots are quick to counter that these accidents, most of them due directly or indirectly to some error on the part of the pilot, could have happened just as easily at any other airport. In recent interviews, even pilots who have become part of Meadowlark’s crash statistics fiercely defended the aging airport.

“I didn’t have time to get in and out before I crashed, but it’s not the airport’s fault,” said James F. Blakely, a Huntington Beach physician who piloted his Mooney plane into a pickup truck last week when, as he said, he came in too fast for landing and ran out of runway.

“If you could add some runway to that place instead of closing it, it would be much better,” he said. “But it’s not the facility’s fault that crashes occur.”

Meadowlark’s single runway, 2,330 feet long with only 1,822 feet available for landing, falls short of California’s minimum standards for airports, which require that runways have at least 2,450 feet available for both takeoff and landing. At 36 feet wide, it is also narrower than the state’s 50-foot minimum standard.

Considered in Compliance

But because the airport was built before these standards took effect, it is considered to be in full compliance, said Dennis Williams of the state Division of Aeronautics, who estimated that about 10% of California’s airports have runways just as short.

The Federal Aviation Administration has identical runway length requirements, plus standards for clear zones around the runways. Meadowlark probably falls short of “the majority” of those standards, but it is not required to meet them because it is privately owned and does not receive federal grants, said Robert Bloom of the agency’s airports division.

“Just because it doesn’t meet the standards, I don’t know if you could come down and say it’s an unsafe airport,” Bloom added. “The safeness is the responsibility of the pilot.”

A Difficult Airport

Nearly all pilots and aviation officials agree that Meadowlark is a difficult airport, particularly for the inexperienced pilot. The narrowness of the runway can be unnerving. Tall trees and telephone wires near the approach end can cause a pilot to fly in too high, making it even more difficult to land on the short runway available. Office buildings, busy streets and apartment buildings lie in wait below in the event of an engine failure on takeoff.

“I can take any normal pilot with maybe 300 or 400 hours and take him over to Meadowlark for the first time, and he’ll get a lump in his throat on final (approach),” said Gary Lackey, owner and chief flight instructor at John Wayne Airport’s Lenair Aviation, which offers licensed pilots special training for operating at Meadowlark.

“If that airport were out in the tules, or in a very unpopulated area, there’d be no problem with it,” he said. “It’s not an unsafe airport. But the fact is that it is a marginal airport, in that it is a small airport, nestled in amongst a very populated area.”

Incidents such as those at Meadowlark last month--a pilot coming in too fast, a pilot attempting to take off with too much weight on board, a pilot running out of gas--can happen anywhere, Lackey said.

“The problem is that Meadowlark, being marginal, does not tolerate them,” he said.

Aware of Limitations

But Paul Stebelton, accident prevention specialist in the FAA’s Long Beach office, said pilots can avoid accidents simply by being aware of Meadowlark’s limitations before attempting to use the airport.

“The runway is there, and that’s the length of it, and there’s obstacles on the end of it, and if they choose to operate there, it’s a calculated risk,” Stebelton said. “But if a pilot does his homework and his planning and knows what he’s got, he ought to be able to operate there.”

Coming in over the palm trees, telephone wires, Mormon church steeple and slate roofs that form a confusing jumble around Heil Avenue, the Meadowlark runway looks disturbingly tiny, a mere thread of concrete somewhere up ahead, and reachable only once these potentially deadly landmarks are cleared.

But Scott Peltzer has already confidentally radioed in his final approach, pulled down the flaps, throttled back the motor and settled the four-place Cessna in for an easy--if steep--glide. By the time the plane settles on the runway, it is already moving slowly enough to turn at the mid-runway turnoff just a few feet ahead.

“Now what was so hard about that?” demands Peltzer, who regularly pilots an even larger aircraft out of Meadowlark for his family’s construction company.

On takeoff, the Cessna clears the runway with at least half the pavement to spare and glides easily over the bars and offices that line Warner Avenue, over the apartment buildings south of Warner--and out over the glistening ponds of the Bolsa Chica wetlands. The ocean is a monstrous blue expanse up ahead, and the vista on each side extends from the Santa Ana Mountains to Long Beach Harbor.

‘Can Just Take Off’

“Here, you don’t have to talk to a control tower, you can just take off when you want to and go,” Peltzer says.

Meadowlark pilots say they are fearful of losing--in a world of strict regulations and limited airspace--that little bit of freedom that the tiny airstrip affords.

It is a place where, on a Saturday afternoon, you can drive out to the cafe, have a hamburger at one of the picnic tables near the runway and talk airplanes with pilots from all over Southern California who have flown in for the afternoon, says Santa Ana attorney William Gamble, who uses the airport to fly to his offices in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

“Most airports you go to, the larger-type airports, people don’t really know each other,” Gamble said. “You go to Orange County, you fly your plane in, you get out and you park it, and that’s the end of the line. There’s no atmosphere, no congeniality. Meadowlark has kind of been a hub for people that are more involved in aviation itself, people who don’t necessarily fly just to get somewhere, but more for the sake of just flying the plane.”

“I prefer it because it’s smaller and not so crowded,” says Crandall Goodmanson, president and co-founder of Odetics Inc., a major high-tech electronics manufacturing firm based in Anaheim. Goodmanson often flies out of Meadowlark to oversee his company’s aerospace contracts at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Avoids Orange County

“I try to avoid Orange County, because it’s a menace trying to get in and out of there, trying to mix the light airplanes and the jets--someday they’re going to have a real accident out there,” he said.

John Riederich, a Huntington Beach resident by night, a March Air Force Base F-4 fighter pilot by day, parks his private Grumman two-seater at Meadowlark each night after work. Riederich still flies in and out of the airport daily, even though he wound up with his propeller wedged in a nearby bar six years ago when his throttle jammed during a landing.

“It could have happened anywhere, it just happened to happen at Meadowlark,” he said. “It’s the only uncontrolled airport left in Orange County, and to me, I feel that the airport is continually bombarded by people that buy a home there, are perhaps misled by Realtors, and then start the complaints. . . . And I can’t overemphasize the fact that the complaints down there are no different than those sustained at larger airports all over the place.”

Like nearly all of Meadowlark’s pilots, Riederich hopes that enough safety improvements can be installed so that nearby homeowners’ fears are quieted.

“Some of these people have known each other 30, 40 years,” said Creeland. “They’re single, you know, their wives have died, and they just come out here for friendship. It’s their whole life. I think a lot of these people, if this place closed, they would not know where to go. It would literally kill some of these older fellows out here.”

It has been a rocky 10 years. Reacting to occasional accidents, city officials toyed with the idea of declaring the airport a public nuisance. A former airport manager unilaterally closed the airport in a rift with state officials over whether the airport could operate safely without a runway extension.

County officials toyed with the idea of buying the airport, pointing to the need to preserve general aviation facilities in one of the most congested areas of the United States. (The waiting list for plane tie-downs at Orange County and Fullerton ranges from eight months for the smallest planes to six years for medium-sized aircraft. The wait for a hangar at John Wayne Airport is now 15 to 20 years.) But Supervisor Harriett Wieder, whose district includes Huntington Beach, quickly vetoed that idea.

Citizens wrote letters urging a speedy end to the facility. Pilots formed action groups to lobby for keeping it open. Then the Nerio family--owners of Meadowlark and, at one time, owners of much of Huntington Beach and Westminster, including the area that is now the Westminster Mall--threw a new wrench into the fracas with an application to rezone the 64-acre airport as a mobile home park.

The City Council approved it, but the mobile home park never materialized. The Nerios were back a few years later with an application for a mixed commercial-residential development. Facing a flood of protests from airport area homeowners concerned with the traffic that new commercial development would bring, the city denied the application in 1981.

Since then, all sides have been waiting, eyeing each other guardedly in anticipation of the Nerios’ next move.

“There’s no definite plans,” said Art Nerio, a small Japanese-American man often described as a millionaire but who spends his days pumping gas into planes at Meadowlark.

Asked if he would like to see Meadowlark remain an airport, Nerio replies: “I’d rather not answer that question. . . . We thought we’d develop it, and we’ll still probably develop it one of these days.”

Pilots and business operators express guarded frustration about their dealings with Nerio. All have been refused long-term leases with no commitment about how long the airport will remain. Plane owners say Nerio has refused to do much long-term maintenance, hence the ubiquitous potholes and the runway lights that haven’t worked in six months.

Nerio repaved the runway several years ago, but the 99s, an organization of women pilots, paid for the new runway markings. The city prints the noise abatement procedures distributed to pilots.

‘Do It Yourself’

“Most of the pilots have found that the easiest way, if you want to improve the area around your tie-down, you go out and get the asphalt and do it yourself. You want your hangar painted, you paint it yourself,” explains Donald Dodge, co-chairman of the Meadowlark Airport Committee, a group of pilots and homeowners that advises city officials on airport issues.

Dodge believes Meadowlark’s current problems are a combination of poor pilot techniques and bad publicity--noting that John Wayne and Fullerton airports often have gear-up landings and through-the-fence landings that go unreported in the newspapers.

Nonetheless, the committee is preparing a list of proposed safety improvements to be presented to the City Council on Oct. 16 that include a lighted landing-guidance system, a private fund for improvements, such as runway lights, and better security.

Security has been a major problem at Meadowlark, particularly in recent months.

Because an old road right of way still runs along the runway to Warner Avenue, cars like the taxi that Cleeland was complaining about frequently run through the airport grounds. Gasoline is regularly drained from airplane tanks, probably by teen-agers who use it for go-carts, Dodge said.

Ran Out of Gas

Meadowlark pilots blame vandals for a Sept. 4 crash when a plane apparently ran out of gas just after takeoff, even though the pilot said he had filled the tanks the night before. The plane struck a Quonset hut on the airport grounds but no one was seriously injured. “If somebody would have been killed, that would’ve been called murder,” Goodmanson said.

Vandals are probably responsible for destroying the runway lights, which were replaced twice and broken again six months ago when Nerio refused to replace them again, Dodge said.

Though most pilots have stopped using the airport at night since the lights were destroyed, Nerio and others interviewed said some pilots familiar with the facility continue to land at night. How? By pointing the airplane between two lighted telephone polls on Heil Avenue and aiming at the lights of a liquor store at the other end of the field, Nerio said.

“I’ve done it, because I know the airport so well,” Peltzer said. “It isn’t hard to find, because it’s really the only dark spot in this area. Everything else is lighted up.”

State officials said they were not aware that the airport was currently without runway lights.

Private Fund Sought

Dodge and other committee members are hoping the city will establish a private fund, fed by donations from pilots and other interested citizens, to pay for new runway lights and other improvements. They also hope to persuade the city to shut off the right of way along the runway, effectively barring unauthorized automobile traffic and associated vandalism.

Pilots are also proposing new safety seminars to better educate other pilots about the potential pitfalls of flying at Meadowlark.

Lackey explains: “There’s plenty of runway there. But the inexperienced pilot, the one that doesn’t fly as often, they never build up the skill level to handle situations like that, well enough that they don’t get nervous. And most pilots can get away with that; let’s face it, I imagine a lot of landings are made nervously. But you know it’s going to finally catch up with an airport if you have everyone being nervous on landing.”

Residents near the airport remain concerned.

“I live under the takeoff pattern, and you know when they don’t turn their gas on and they start sputtering? We look up and keep our fingers crossed,” said Virginia Oviatt. “When this one just recently plowed into the Orange City Bank, that might have been pilot negligence, but we’re still living underneath them. I’d like to see that airport closed down.”

Bob Graham, a Coldwell Banker real estate agent who handles property in the area, said he has had a $290,000 home under the takeoff path on the market for the past 18 months--without success.

“I’ll tell the world this: Meadowlark Airport is the reason the house hasn’t sold,” Graham said. “The house is a model house, it’s fantastic and everybody loves it. But I have open houses on Saturday and Sunday, and guess when everybody wants to go flying? People come into the open house and all of a sudden, ERRRRARRRGH!!, and they kinda say, ‘Hmmm . . .’ and I say, ‘Yup, that’s it.’ ”

AIRPORT’S CLOSE CALLS Sept. 29, 1985: Plane loses altitude and hits Quonset hut on takeoff. Pilot slightly hurt.

Sept. 21, 1985: Plane crashes through window of unoccupied building, slightly injuring four passengers.

Sept. 5, 1985: Plane runs out of gas and slams into hangar.

June, 1983: While attempting a landing, plane crashes into unoccupied houses near runway, missing children playing nearby. Pilot slightly injured.

May, 1983: Pilot of vintage biplane makes forced landing on Pacific Coast Highway minutes after takeoff.

May, 1982. Pilot walks away from wreckage after plane lands on top of unoccupied mobile home whose owner was an invalid who rarely left home.

May, 1981: Two planes collide on runway with only minor injuries.

August, 1977: Three hurt when plane overshoots runway and slams into Quonset hut.