Burbank Addition : L.A. Official Finds TWA Flights Legal

The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority acted legally in allowing Trans World Airlines to begin service from Burbank Airport, the Los Angeles city attorney’s office said Tuesday.

TWA is offering two round-trip flights daily to St. Louis from Burbank, beginning Saturday. Seven airlines now make 126 flights a day from the airport.

In a report to the Los Angeles City Council’s Planning and Environment Committee, Deputy City Atty. William Waterhouse said the projected impact of the TWA flights does not violate state regulations that limit increases in the airport’s noise-impact area--the zone, determined by a complicated formula, in which the noise is greatest from aircraft landing or taking off.

Noise Complaints

The committee chairman, Councilman Howard Finn, had questioned whether the decision to allow TWA to operate from Burbank Airport violated the state law that established the authority. Finn’s district, in the northeast San Fernando Valley, includes Los Angeles neighborhoods where residents complain about noise from the airport.

Since the two TWA flights will increase the noise-impact area by only 7.7 acres to a total of 109.7 acres, state law was not violated, Waterhouse said. The legal limit on the noise-impact area is 330 acres, airport authorities said.

The City Council committee instructed Waterhouse to investigate whether the airport authority attempted to mitigate noise from the added flights.

Waterhouse told the committee that airport officials had not provided him with any documents indicating that they had studied the noise impact of the TWA flights. Airport spokesman Victor Gill said the airport was not required to do environmental studies before adding flights.

In a related development, Burbank city officials continued to raise the possibility that TWA had been given permission to begin the flights despite a “veto” by Burbank representatives on the airport authority.

Burbank City Atty. Doug Holland late last month wrote a letter to the president of the authority, Robert Garcin, asking for a clarification of the joint-powers agreement among Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena, the three cities that own the airport.

Each city has three representatives on the nine-member airport authority.

Holland said that, under the joint-powers agreement, any decision that “directly or indirectly authorizes any activity which may result in an increase” in noise must be approved by a majority of the members of each city’s delegation, in addition to a majority of the commissioners on the authority.

One Favored Application

Only one of the three Burbank commissioners voted to approve the TWA application, Holland said, and Burbank may consequently have vetoed the application. One Burbank member was absent from the meeting at which the application was considered, and one--Mayor Mary Lou Howard--voted against it.

But airport officials said that, under federal law, the authority had no choice but to admit TWA to the airport because the airline met the two conditions for admission: The noise-impact area was not increased above the legal limit and the airline agreed to use aircraft classified by the Federal Aviation Administration as the quietest available.

Airport representatives said they were preparing a response to Holland’s letter.