‘It’s not just the sound. It vibrates. It does something to your insides.’-- Margaret Rawls, 21 miles from LAX runway : Calabasas Community, FAA Collide on Jet Noise

As the crow flies, Margaret Rawls’ home in Calabasas is 21 miles from the end of the runway at Los Angeles International Airport.

But, as the jets fly, her house seems much closer. Sometimes she feels as though she is living at the edge of the runway Tarmac instead of the edge of the San Fernando Valley.

Rawls lives beneath one of the airport’s main flight paths to Northern California.

“It’s devastating,” Rawls says, raising her voice over the sound of a passing plane, one the 70 jetliners that roar overhead daily from 6 a.m. to midnight.

“It’s not just the sound. It vibrates. It does something to your insides. It’s forced people to move. . . . It keeps us from sleeping at night.”

The flight path has put residents of Rawls’ 100-house Calabasas Highlands neighborhood on a collision course with the Federal Aviation Administration since officials six years ago realigned a takeoff route known to pilots as “Gorman Five.”

Positions Clash

On Friday, the positions of officials and homeowners crashed head-on.

FAA officials released the results of a study that they said proves noise is not a significant problem in Calabasas Highlands.

Angry residents immediately denounced the government findings and vowed to step up their campaign to force jets away from their homes.

Richard A. Cox, chief of the FAA’s Terminal Radar Approach Control Division at Los Angeles International Airport, said sound readings taken the morning of July 9 and the evening of July 22 in Calabasas Highlands showed that aircraft noise is not the deafening roar that homeowners allege.

The sound monitoring was undertaken by the FAA at the request of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation, which filed noise complaints with local congressmen and aviation officials.

According to Los Angeles air traffic controllers, planes are at an altitude of about 9,000 feet over Calabasas after climbing from the airport and passing over Santa Monica Bay and Malibu. Aircraft headed for Sacramento and other destinations in the state’s central area use the Gorman Five departure route.

75 Decibels Maximum

Previous FAA studies of the area yielded calculations that a maximum noise of 75 decibels could be generated by aircraft passing over Calabasas under a “worst-case situation”--a fully loaded Boeing 727 weighing 197,000 pounds.

Cox said the sound of July’s departing planes measured from 55 to 74 decibels. He said that is too low to “justify the kinds of complaints that are being generated” by Calabasas homeowners.

“I think it closes the books,” Cox said of the thick FAA complaint file on Calabasas noise.

“People out there are a little more sensitive to sounds.”

Cox, who participated in the noise testing himself, said passing trucks and barking dogs seemed more of an intrusion to him than the passing planes.

The homeowners disagreed Friday.

Calabasas Highlands is not a neighborhood where one would expect noise to be an issue. The hillside community south of Mulholland Highway is isolated from major development and insulated from the sounds of factories or freeways--the Ventura Freeway is more than a mile to the north.

Sleep in Basement

Rawls, who said she and her husband, Frank, have been forced by the noise to sleep in their home’s basement, asserted that jet noise readings taken with her own sound meter often reach 80 and 90 decibels.

“When we built our house here in 1967 it was quiet enough to hear a pin drop,” she said. “I had an acoustical engineer check my sound meter and he said it was accurate. He said that 75 decibels is too loud to sleep through.”

She blames her 75-year-old husband’s recent heart attack on the noise.

Dennis Washburn, a Calabasas resident who heads a coalition of 15 neighborhood groups, said his Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation will ask the FAA to “think creatively” for a solution to the noise problem.

“Inbound traffic coming in at 13,000 feet has a noise level that is tolerable, although still significant. The noise at 9,000 feet is intolerable,” Washburn said.

He said his group is prepared to seek help from “a higher authority” in the FAA to get the departure route moved further west, away from Calabasas Highlands.

Move Called Unlikely

FAA officials said such a move is unlikely.

Officials said the Gorman departure lane was moved over Calabasas Highlands in 1969 after noise complaints from people living in the Woodland Hills area, beneath the former flight path.

One of those 1969 complainers was Melvin Lees, who said peace and quiet descended on his neighborhood after the planes were rerouted a mile or so west to Calabasas.

“It worked. The noise stopped. We were dumbfounded,” Lees recalled Friday. “When the jets were overhead, there was shaking like a train was going through your house. It really was not a pleasant sound.”

The FAA’s Cox said there is no overhead room west of Calabasas for another move. Air space over the Malibu Canyon-Agoura area is reserved for flights coming into Los Angeles and space farther west is used by military pilots at Point Mugu Naval Air Station.

“The Southern California airways are far more complex than the freeways, and just as crowded,” Cox said.

“If you look at moving noise from one area to another, you just put it over somebody else’s home. We’d be incurring the wrath and complaints of those people.”