Fight Over Airport Noise: Is Public’s Safety Affected?

Cleared for takeoff in your new-generation, quiet twin-engine jet, autopilot armed, you . . . pull the throttles way back . . . A lot farther than you would if you weren’t making a noise-abatement takeoff . . . .

The script goes awry at 600 feet when you run into a moderate size, dry air microburst . . . the size that normally could be flown through with takeoff power.

Now your airplane is heading for the trees and the rooftops . . . Will you . . . manually recover in time? If not, you’ll soon make the loudest single noise event the airport’s neighbors have ever heard, right in their backyards.

When Air Line Pilot magazine envisioned this scenario in a recent issue, it wasn’t talking about experimental test flights in high-performance jets.

It was talking about a routine takeoff of a McDonnell Douglas MD-80, loaded with passengers, at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport--routine since the airport became the only one in the nation approved for noise-abatement takeoffs in which power is reduced at just 500 feet.

The procedure won unexpected federal approval last year, reversing the Federal Aviation Administration’s historic prohibition against any power cutbacks below 1,000 feet.

The decision followed heavy lobbying from a Newport Beach congressman and the McDonnell Douglas Corp., a company that practically invented the “quiet” jet with the MD-80, but which has seen its competitive edge at noise-sensitive airports like John Wayne dwindle in only a few years with the introduction of even quieter commercial jets.

Over the last few years, noise abatement has become virtually the only admission ticket to lucrative new air travel markets throughout the nation. While major air terminals in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have been battling jet noise for 30 years or more, the airlines’ exodus to smaller, shorter-haul airports since deregulation in 1978 has spawned a whole new generation of noise problems at what used to be community airports.

From California to Connecticut, a powerful citizens lobby against airport noise has been gaining clout, helping to push through strict new flight procedures designed to reduce noise over sensitive residential areas: power cutbacks, sharp turns after takeoff and runway assignments based on noise impact rather than wind conditions.

And airline pilots have become increasingly alarmed about the safety aspects of the new regulations. Of four U.S. airports listed as safety hazards by the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Assns., three of them--Los Angeles, San Francisco and Tampa--have made the list because of noise-abatement procedures.

“I like to refer to it as a cancer that has the potential of spreading throughout the whole country. It runs from disadvantageous to dangerous, and it’s always somewhere in between, depending on the procedure and the airport,” said Roger Brooks, a first officer for Frontier Airlines.

‘Pull More Tricks Here’

“The whole point is, flying is safe because you have safety margins, and all these margins are getting rolled away for political reasons,” said Richard Deeds, a pilot for Western Airlines who heads the Air Line Pilots Assn.’s noise-abatement committee. “What the companies end up doing is telling the pilots, pull more tricks here, pull the power back a little bit more there. Where’s the bottom line on this thing?”

Nationwide, airports with some noise restrictions increased from 110 to 175 within the past year alone, according to the National Business Aircraft Assn. Other estimates put the number even higher.

Airlines say the growing clout of the citizens’ groups has squeezed company profits, raised passenger fares and limited the number of available flights.

“Basically, we’ve got a national air transportation system which is being cut up by . . . communities that are not taking into consideration the national consequences of what they’re doing,” said David Murchison, senior attorney for the Air Transport Assn., an airline industry trade group which has petitioned the federal government to preempt many local noise regulations.

An estimated 5 million people nationwide live near airports, up to 1 million of them in California. Nearly 200,000 California families live in areas so noisy that they are deemed inappropriate for residences under the state’s airport noise standards.

And because the courts in recent years have held local airport operators liable for noise damages, their clout in forcing the adoption of noise controls has been considerable.

Federal officials estimate $3.25 billion in suits are pending throughout the nation alleging emotional distress and property damage from jet noise. Los Angeles already has paid $29 million to residents around Los Angeles International Airport, and complaints totaling an additional $59 million are pending.

Many Claims Still Pending

At Ontario International Airport, where noise is not considered a major problem, lawsuits now total about $10 million, and another $200 million worth of claims, which must be submitted before actual suits are filed, are pending.

The result has been a rush to clamp a lid on jet noise, in one form or another, at nearly every major and mid-size airport in the nation--a lid that airport neighbors say is justifiable.

“Airports are as important a part of our national fabric as you could find. I’m all in favor of having airports. But they ought not to be so that some part of the population has to suffer for the rest of us,” said attorney Jerrold Fadem, a leading airport noise attorney who has represented residents near John Wayne, Los Angeles and Burbank airports.

Barbara Lichman, executive director of the Orange County Airport Working Group, said airport neighbors enjoy the same constitutional guarantees of physical well-being and free use of their property as anyone else. “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that airplanes have priority over those things,” she said.

A key part of recent noise-control efforts has been the move to phase out older, noisier jets in favor of new-technology jets that are significantly quieter on takeoff.

Nowhere has that effort been more pronounced than in Orange County, where the ranks of airport neighbors include Pilar Wayne (who was married to the late John Wayne), millionaire developer Henry Segerstrom, actor Buddy Ebsen and the chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, Thomas F. Riley.

Orange County became the only airport in the nation last year to eliminate all jets noisier than the McDonnell Douglas MD-80, a jet that meets the strictest federal standards for noise abatement.

And county officials have now gone even further in a settlement with Newport Beach homeowners that will allow additional flights at John Wayne only if jets much quieter than the MD-80--aircraft like the new Boeing 737/300 and the British Aerospace BAe-146--are used.

With airlines already rushing to acquire the new jets, Orange County officials say they expect more than half of the fleet serving John Wayne eventually to be converted to those new jets--a feat unparalleled in the rest of the nation.

The new jets are so quiet that county officials estimate they will be able to fly 25 to 30 additional departures beyond the 55 daily flights now authorized, and as many as 100 extra departures with the quiet aircraft once a new terminal is built in the early 1990s--a total of perhaps 150 departures a day, all without appreciable increases in overall jet noise.

Not surprisingly, McDonnell Douglas is fighting back. The Long Beach-based manufacturer has promised to fight the settlement, which company officials regard as discriminatory against the MD-80, heralded only a few years ago as the quietest of commercial jets.

The company won federal approval for the 500-foot power cutback on the MD-80 at John Wayne--the only relaxation anywhere in the FAA’s restrictions against cutbacks below 1,000 feet--to help keep its competitive edge against the quieter jets.

Only American Airlines is using the voluntary procedure, a measure airline officials say helps meet the county’s strict noise limits on its heavily loaded flights to Dallas/Fort Worth.

No Problems Experienced

The cutback is permitted only on MD-80s equipped with a special power advance system which, in the event one of the aircraft’s two engines fails, automatically advances the other engine to nearly full power. No problems with the procedure have been experienced, nor are any anticipated, American Airlines spokesmen said.

But officials of the pilots association say they are concerned about the automatic thrust advance system because it pushes the good engine to full power with no input from the pilot. “That could do more harm than good,” said Bill Melvin, a Delta Air Lines pilot who heads the association’s airworthiness and performance committee. “You may be in a condition where it’ll advance too fast and power you into minimum control.”

Signs of a problem emerged last year, Deeds said, when Republic Airlines tested the procedure on its simulator in Atlanta.

Test pilots found that when they lost power in one engine and boosted the other to full thrust, the airplane began veering off course, turning so sharply that it exceeded the ability of the airplane’s sophisticated flight guidance system to correct for the turn. At Republic’s request, McDonnell Douglas has developed a new autopilot system that will be able to correct for the turning effect.

But Delta Air Lines’ Melvin and a number of other pilots say they are concerned, in any case, that the 500-foot cutback is too severe and potentially hazardous if a pilot encounters windshear or severe temperature inversions after takeoff, or must maneuver quickly to avoid other aircraft near the airport.

“On a stormy day, where it’s windy and you’ve got gusts out there, a pilot would have to be crazy to risk his plane and his passengers by doing a noise-abatement departure” such as the 500-foot power cutback imposed at John Wayne Airport, Deeds said.

FAA officials say they have examined pilots’ concerns over the cutback procedure and found them unwarranted. “The FAA has examined those questions very thoroughly and carefully, and our people are satisfied with the safety, or they would not have approved those procedures,” said John Wesler, head of the FAA’s energy and environment section in Washington.

Chief pilots for McDonnell Douglas and American Airlines, which uses the 500-foot power cutback, say the procedure has been tested and retested and found to be safe.

But the power cutback is only one of an array of noise-abatement flying techniques over which pilots have voiced safety concerns.

Skidded Tails on Runway

The Air Line Pilots Assn. recently filed a complaint with FAA administrator Donald Engen about five instances in the past few months in which Boeing 737/300s taking off from John Wayne Airport skidded their tails on the runway in an effort to lift off as quickly as possible and climb well above the noise monitor nearest the airport.

In Los Angeles, pilots for years have complained about noise regulations requiring pilots to make late-night approaches from over the ocean--often with a slight tailwind--rather than the usual flight path over the communities of Inglewood and Westchester.

The FAA so far has refused to grant the pilot association’s request for eight miles of separation between approaching aircraft and jets taking off into the nighttime approach pattern, Deeds said. “I challenge some of these people to sit out in a cockpit at night and look at a set of lights that’s coming at you and tell me if that’s a 747 fifteen miles away or a 727 two miles away--and we’re closing on each other at a speed of 10 miles a minute.”

ALPA safety officers cite Los Angeles’ nighttime approach procedures as a factor in the 1974 crash of a Boeing 707, which slammed into the runway after attempting to land in a fog bank that shrouded only the oceanward end of the runway. The normal approach end of the runway was clear. Eight passengers were injured, and the aircraft was destroyed.

The National Transportation Safety Board listed the approach pattern as only one factor in the accident, but recommended installing better approach lights and instruments for pilots arriving from over the ocean, recommendations that later were implemented.

Jim McCord, who until recently was in charge of noise-abatement programs for the FAA in Los Angeles, said the runway improvements have helped make overwater approaches as safe as possible. He said an FAA flight team “flew (the approach) every which way that they could think of, under all kinds of weather conditions, and they went back and reported, it is safe, they could find nothing wrong with it.”

Another battleground has been San Francisco International, where pilots often are required to make a 180-degree turn after takeoff to remain over San Francisco Bay, a departure that some pilots believe takes them too close to a 1,500-foot hill near the edge of the bay.

Lights Not Installed

While heavy jets like the Boeing 747 are not asked to make the departure--because it is recognized they often could not clear the hill--the pilots association has been unable to persuade the FAA to install lights on the hill for other pilots, Deeds said.

“Nobody’s crashed into it yet. I’m serious. That’s the argument I get all the time,” he said. “How about the day when everything’s gone to hell and bells are ringing in the cockpit and you’re headed straight for that mountain, it sure would be nice to have a light on that mountain.”

Ron Wilson, San Francisco’s airport spokesman, said most pilots do not appear concerned about the departure or the lack of lighting on Mt. San Bruno, although the airport’s official noise-abatement program suggests lighting as a topic for future study. “If it was an unsafe departure, it would not be used,” Wilson said. “It seems to be the contention of most pilots that it is not unsafe.”

In Orange County, pilots have historically been troubled by fears that they may be asked to fly in ways that may be unsafe to meet specified decibel limits, an requirement that airport officials deny they would ever make.

At one point, when airport authorities suggested allocating flights based on which airline could fly most quietly, pilots quickly formed a committee to protest.

“You’d of course encourage the pilots to do everything in their power to not make noise, and that might mean that instead of reducing power at 1,000 feet, maybe they might reduce it a little early,” explains Roger Nilson, pilot for an airline that flies out of airports all over the West Coast.

“They said, ‘You mean you pilots would do something like that?’ And we said if you knew your company would get five extra flights by making a certain decibel level, yes, I think pilots would do that.”

PSA, for example, barely meets the 86-decibel takeoff limit required for airlines to qualify for additional flights at Orange County.

Special Takeoff Procedure

To meet it, the airline has established a special takeoff procedure, explained to all passengers shortly before takeoff, in which full power is applied before the brakes are released, then the airplane lifts off sharply and, at 1,000 feet, reduces power until it is over the coast and clear of Newport Beach residences below.

The Air Line Pilots Assn. is asking the federal government to develop a standardized noise-abatement procedure that can be used at any airport, then withhold federal funding to airports that do not comply with it.

The association is also pushing for more and better training for pilots in noise-abatement techniques and more thorough information on local requirements for pilots who are unfamiliar with a particular noise-sensitive airport.

“I’ve grown up with noise. From the day I was hired, they beat me with noise with a stick,” said Nilson, whose airline flies frequently into Orange County, Burbank, San Diego and other extremely noise-sensitive airports. “But at many airlines, it’s not a requirement. Some of the airlines flying into John Wayne, the first time they see that procedure is when they get there. And they haven’t done anything except maybe read the chart their company has given them.”

John Wayne Airport noise-abatement officer Chris Edwards said noise restrictions are structured so that pilots, on any given day, should not think they are required to use techniques that they believe are unsafe.

“We don’t look at flights and the noise they make on an individual basis; we look at them over a long enough period of time that while pilot technique is an important factor, we’re not pinning down any one pilot on any one day who, because of circumstances beyond his control, may have to do something a little bit different than the standard noise-abatement procedure.”