Solution Offered to Airport Noise

What the FAA knows about airports, you could stick into the “O” in politics.

In Long Beach, they have handed an airport task force some federal money to prove in kindergarten formulas that adding more jetliners to Long Beach Airport will in fact make less noise.

The formulas, with the help of bucket studies in cumulative arrangements over one year, prove that the noise you heard when that 727 cleared your house by 100 feet on takeoff was only an average, like the purr of a kitten, and you therefore have no reason to complain.

While the FAA tries to coerce the people of Long Beach to forget the Environmental Impact Review, and the task force has only studied the noise impact in its two years, we, in the 8th District in particular, have politically been selected to have 99.9% of all the takeoffs. To us this means more noise, black acid smoke and air crash possibilities around an airport full of schools and homes.

The most serious point of logic in commercial growth that the FAA is so amazingly ignorant of is economics. Our organization, called STOP (Stop Takeover of Planes), believes in an economic solution that requires the return of the airport to the people.

A viable plan is taking the 1,178 acres of the airport and making 117 10-acre industrial parks that would put the money into the local community, rather than having a few airliners return to their terminal far away, with the money for tickets there, and leaving us their pollution and hazards.

The jobs from these 117 industrial parks would mean $2 million per week. The land could be sold for $1,138,608,000. Placed in escrow for the people (we own the land), it would keep the kids in the city from buying any more toys like the Queen Mary, The Goose and hotels for dignitaries right by the city hall, where they can admire them from the penthouse floor.

Borrowing from escrow to build an offshore island airport would both free the city of the airport problem and would be a win-win solution to the FAA investments into international airports, or preferably, Long Beach could have a toy that pays off economically.

Strangely enough, the powers that be delayed for about five years a light rail system from Long Beach to LAX, a super airport to all parts of the world, handing it to RTD, who wants to sink the money into a hole under Wilshire (Boulevard), to prove it loses more money than the buses. From San Diego to the border, the light rail makes a “profit.”

--LOU ROBILLARD

Long Beach

Robillard is chief executive of STOP.