Pilots’ ‘Combat Fear’ : Anxiety in Southland’s Busy Skies

Barry Schiff, a private pilot, flight instructor and airline pilot for 22 years, slid his finger across a Southern California aeronautical chart until it stopped at an unregulated chunk of sky bordered roughly by Ontario, La Habra and Fullerton.

Because the chunk lies just outside the restricted airspace of Los Angeles International Airport’s “terminal control area,” it attracts many private pilots. The trouble is, it also attracts many airline pilots, who fly jets through it at nearly 300 m.p.h. on a specified LAX approach pattern.

“I suspect,” Schiff said matter-of-factly, “that the next midair will happen around here.”

Dark Thoughts

Similar dark thoughts about aircraft collisions have long been shared among pilots who navigate over the Los Angeles Basin, the nation’s most crowded and complex airspace.

Torrance flight instructor Richard Dingman worries whether any of “those idiots”--weekend pilots with insufficient training or errant judgment--are flying in his vicinity. “I find them regularly,” he said. “You see traffic patterns where it looks like people don’t know where the airport is.”

Van Nuys flight instructor Tom Mills worries about the other small planes that he often encounters in a four-square-mile corridor the Federal Aviation Administration created to steer traffic above the LAX jet takeoff pattern. “The corridor gives me combat fear,” Mills said.

And airline pilot Wally Roberts worries about whether he can spot all the small planes that flit in and around his approach pattern to LAX--some of them in violation of the restrictive terminal control area (TCA).

“It’s like playing Russian roulette in three dimensions,” he said.

Anxiety Readily Expressed

Such anxiety has been more readily expressed in the wake of the Aug. 31 collision over Cerritos of an Aeromexico DC-9 and a Piper Archer that killed 82 passengers, crew and residents of the area.

The crash--the 30th midair collision in Los Angeles County since 1964--has raised questions not only about how or why the pilot of the Piper flew into the TCA without authorization, but whether the regulatory system itself makes sense. Also at issue is whether the average private pilot has the sophistication and vigilance to deal with the system.

Interviews with more than two dozen commercial and private pilots found a split of opinion. Some view the crash as an anomaly--a gross error by the Piper pilot, William K. Kramer. Others regard it as the inevitable consequence in a region where such a large number of pilots--more than 21,000 in Los Angeles County alone--must fly under airspace restrictions that are often compared to a unfathomable jigsaw puzzle.

What is clear, however, is that the demands of navigating the Basin are far greater than many men and women anticipated when they decided that they wanted to fly.

Here, amid a jumble of little Cessnas and sleek Lears and massive Air Force C-141s and Boeing 747s, all flying at vastly different speeds, man’s age-old desire to soar with abandon is hemmed in by boundary lines and navigation equipment requirements and the all-too-frequent presence of The Other Guy who may--just may--make a mistake.

It is not the way they describe it in how-to-fly books, which traditionally presume that the pilot’s primary chore will be mastering his relationship with his airplane in the vast, open skies above a pastoral landscape.

“What it’s like here,” said a pilot who learned to fly in Colorado and was stunned by the number of planes in the air when he flew into Santa Monica, “is everybody rushing to the cosmetics counter at Macy’s.”

Distances Closed Fast

To those on the ground, such descriptions sound like the Hollywood Freeway. The skies are not like that. Normally, planes are miles apart. But because even private planes can approach 200 m.p.h., distances can be closed with dramatic suddenness.

Which is what Lou Fricke thinks about when he takes off from a small airport in the east San Fernando Valley.

Fricke, a Newhall heating and cooling contractor, grew up in Minnesota. As a boy, he would lie in the grass and stare up at passing airplanes, dreaming about the day that he, too, would be up there, free.

It took a long time--he was past 40 when he finally got his pilot’s license--and by then he was living in Los Angeles, flying out of Whiteman Airport, six miles northeast of the nation’s busiest general aviation facility, Van Nuys Airport, and six miles northwest of Burbank Airport, which is used by scheduled airliners and private planes.

More than 2,000 planes take off or land at Van Nuys and Burbank airports each day. The airports’ takeoff and landing patterns intersect with each other as well as with Whiteman’s.

‘Just Become Wiser’

This environment has not diminished Fricke’s love of flying. “When I go into the air, I forget all my problems.” In fact, he feels it has made him a better pilot. “I don’t get scared flying around. I’ve just become wiser.”

But it has forced him to consider other possibilities.

Such as: Suppose a pilot in one of the commercial jets that flies above Whiteman’s takeoff and landing pattern en route to Burbank forgets or ignores the FAA’s rules and comes in too low?

Planes taking off and landing at Whiteman, a county airport crowded with small private planes but lacking a traffic control tower, are supposed to stay below 2,000 feet. Planes coming over Whiteman into Burbank are supposed to stay above 3,000. The margin for error seems clear, but to Fricke it is not enough.

“Once I was sitting here (over Whiteman) at 1,700 feet and looking down on a jet” headed for Burbank, he said. “I about dropped over. . . . For three or four years I have predicted an accident over the San Fernando Valley. The pilots at Whiteman are accepting that this will happen.”

Other private pilots disagree with Fricke. Worried that the FAA will use any public misgivings to impose further airspace restrictions in the wake of the Cerritos crash, they contend that the system is reasonably structured.

Pilots trained at busy airports are drilled extensively in sophisticated navigation and most have had far more than the FAA-required minimum 40 hours of flying before obtaining their licenses, these defenders say. (Extensive additional training is required for an “instrument” license, which permits a pilot to fly in poor visibility.) As a result, these pilots say, few pilots leave the Basin with sweat-stained shirts or fear-stained brows.

“I don’t see all of this hullabaloo about all these planes in the air,” said Bob Jackson, a longtime flight instructor. “It’s just not so. Yes, there’s a lot of density here, but it’s controlled and there are a lot of intelligent people flying around.”

Added instructor Dingman, who flew B-29s in Korea: “Air traffic is just like combat. You read about these thousands of men in a battle, but it’s nothing but a whole lot of one-on-one. That’s where you get into trouble.”

The question of how well private pilots play that game is the primary focus of the air safety debate triggered by the Cerritos crash.

For one thing, private pilots and student pilots make up nearly three-quarters of the licensed pilots in Los Angeles County.

Private Pilots’ Training

For another, these pilots’ training and subsequent review (required once every two years by the FAA) is far less extensive than that of commercial airline pilots, who receive months of standardized instruction.

And finally, unlike airline pilots who fly fixed routes under the guidance of FAA air traffic controllers, private pilots can often go pretty much where they like as long as they honor FAA guidelines for traffic separation.

They often fly under “visual flight” rules (permitted when the minimum visibility is good), requiring no route approval or special equipment--not even a two-way radio if they fly out of one of the 42 small airports in Southern California with no control tower.

To keep such planes away from airliners, the FAA 15 years ago created the Los Angeles TCA, a 52-by-24-mile swath. The TCA can be entered only by airliners and other planes that have both sophisticated instrumentation and air traffic controller approval.

The creation of the TCA was the biggest shot fired in a running airspace war between private pilots and airline pilots.

To airliners, private planes are slow-moving nuisances that should be segregated outside busy airports. Private pilots, in turn, often complain that airline pilots arrogantly plow through the skies without paying enough attention to surrounding traffic, presuming controllers are protecting them.

Beneath that rhetoric, both sides are constantly balancing the aesthetics that make flying majestic with the technical demands that make it dangerous.

Seeing Other Planes

The struggle begins with the simple effort to see other planes.

The sky is a perplexing background, vast enough to appear safe and to hide a myriad of targets. Los Angeles’ perpetual haze weakens powers of observation. A bright, clear day--robbing the pilot of all contrast--does the same.

Private pilots, defending themselves against new airspace controls, often speak of how rare it is to see another plane within miles on weekdays and perhaps a few thousand feet on weekends.

To which Hal Fishman, a longtime Los Angeles television news broadcaster who flies his plane to some assignments, responds sardonically: “I am sure there are guys who’ll tell you, ‘I never see another plane.’ Don’t fly with that guy.”

“You’re looking for a black dot on a background that is so big and so large,” said Ernie Arobles, another private pilot. “Let’s say you have a table with beige-colored tile. You drop a granola flake on it and stand 10 to 15 feet away. Can you spot a granola flake?”

Added Sammy Mason, a former Lockheed test pilot and retired flight instructor: “People wonder how, on a clear day, two planes can run together. The fact is, both pilots could have been looking quite intensely.”

Just as big a problem, said Mason, echoing a common complaint of veteran pilots, is that pilots “are just too busy to look out for one another. We tend to hide our heads and eyes in cockpits, spending too much time looking at the instruments and talking on the radio.”

The pressure that pulls a pilot’s eyes away from the sky is greatest on airline pilots, who must constantly monitor a complex instrument panel and stay in radio contact with controllers via a changing set of frequencies.

The worst time is on airport approach because there are more controls to manipulate, more conversation with the control tower--and, suddenly, the presence of many other planes.

Pilots concentrate on constantly shifting their vision from inside the cockpit to outside. But in airliners, particularly when taking off or landing, a crew that might prefer to be looking outward every 10 seconds might let 20 seconds go by instead. And as airlines shift to planes that use two pilots rather than three, the ability to look around is further eroded, pilots say.

‘Really Taxes Your Time’

“They want you to look out the window, but the duties in the cockpit have to come first,” said Russ Risk, a retired Flying Tigers pilot. “It really taxes your time.”

Added airline pilot Schiff: “We wouldn’t mind at all if the airlines simply hired private pilots with 200 hours of experience just to look out the (jet’s) cockpit.”

With this limited vision, airliners are highly dependent upon air traffic controllers. But controllers admit that they cannot warn pilots of everything.

Most private planes are equipped with a transponder, which lets an air traffic controller determine the plane’s existence. However, only about half also have an encoding altimeter, which specifies the altitude.

Thus, controllers are often unable to tell whether two converging blips on a screen reflect planes on a collision course or ones that are safely separated by thousands of feet in altitude.

In these situations, a controller can tell an airline pilot that a plane is within a particular range--say, “11 o’clock, two miles”--but not how high.

Which is what gives pilots the willies.

“I’ve had calls from the tower, and you’ll look and you’ll look and sometimes you’ll see the traffic and when you do you’re amazed you didn’t see it sooner,” said airline pilot Wayne Gate. “Or maybe the last remark you’ll hear (from the tower) will be, ‘No longer a factor,’ and you never did see it.”

Private planes are not allowed in the busy TCA unless they have both a transponder and an encoding altimeter, as well as a radio. But, either out of ignorance or a determination to save time, small planes without the required equipment daily cut across the TCA, a mistake many pilots regard as suicidal because of the heavy airline traffic.

Some private pilots, acknowledging the presence of a small number of renegade aviators, say they feel a similar anxiety when they fly “under control”--proceeding along a path dictated over the radio by an air traffic controller.

‘Just Blow by Me’

“The planes will just blow by me, and those guys (the air traffic controllers) haven’t said anything,” complained Peter Gillcrist, a recently licensed private pilot.

More experienced private pilots say that anytime a pilot shifts from the pure “see-and-be-seen” approach to flying under the direction of an air traffic controller, he tends to become more lax about “getting his head out of the cockpit” and trying to spot surrounding traffic.

It is a habit that must be guarded against, instructor Dingman said. “If I think they’re (the controllers) covering all the bets, forget it.”

When pilots talk about the Cerritos crash, they bounce these kind of variables off one another, trying to figure out which combination led to the midair collision: Did the DC-9 crew ever see the Piper? How much of the crew’s concentration was inside the cockpit? How much time passed between periodic outward glances? Did Piper pilot Kramer, who had lived in Southern California for only a year, know he was crossing into the TCA? Was he so busy trying to correlate the ground below to the imaginary lines on his aeronautical chart that he did not pay enough attention to the surrounding traffic?

The answers are pending an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. Those that depend on subtle factors of concentration may never be clear.

Thus the discussion is limited to syndromes.

“What worries me,” Fishman said, “are the people flying the plane, and they’ve got their head down, looking at the (aeronautical) map, saying, ‘Where the hell do I go?’ ”

Pilots who fly infrequently are particularly susceptible to making such errors, pilots say.

The weekend pilot--a loose characterization of a well-to-do recreational flier who buys a plane but begins flying less frequently after his initial fervor for flying diminishes--is often cited as a major hazard.

‘Not as Alert’

“Almost every single pilot who flies a lot is really concerned about the weekend pilots,” said Bernadette Shupe, who flies out of Cable Airport in Upland. “It’s not that they’re not sharp; it’s that maybe they go out to have fun and should be careful. They’re really excited, and they want to see the ground. They’re not as alert.”

(Similarly concerned, the FAA three weeks ago said it will begin sending more staff members to local airports to “counsel” private pilots before they take off, making random inquiries about whether the pilot has a flight plan and is familiar with the area he plans to fly.)

Shupe, who has flown for five years, was one of many pilots who began altering their flying habits in January, when the FAA created three Airport Radar Service Areas (ARSAs), which restrict flying around Burbank and Ontario airports and the El Toro Marine Air Station in Orange County.

Keeping Tabs on Traffic

The idea was for controllers in those airports, which serve commercial as well as private and military planes, to keep better tabs on traffic. Planes approaching an ARSA must receive control tower approval to fly within 10 miles of the airport.

The trouble is, Shupe and other private pilots complain, that controllers are so busy that they often decline to give permission to planes to enter the ARSA, telling pilots to “stand by.” This means pilots must either wait for approval, or fly underneath, over or around the ARSA, often going out of their way.

Some pilots worry that while the ARSAs are reducing the likelihood of a collision near busy airports, they may cause other problems by pushing groups of private planes into the same segment of unregulated airspace.

Instructor Mills noted that airliners from San Francisco descend into Burbank Airport over an area of the west San Fernando Valley where more private pilots have begun to fly in an effort to circle around the western edge of the Burbank Airport ARSA.

“To me, the ARSAs make people believe that these traffic conflicts are real only within that 10-mile arc, but in a sense the conflicts extend farther than that,” Mills said.

Richard Vacar, Burbank Airport’s manager of airport affairs, said such potential conflicts are evidence that the FAA’s system for controlling the airspace here is “a patchwork that has been bandaged up over time when there’s been a breakdown.”

Training Criticized

Vacar, who spent 10 years as an FAA air controller and procedures specialist, said he believes that standards for training private pilots have not kept up with the increased sophistication of airspace regulation any better than the regulations have kept up with the growth of Southern California aviation.

“A typical pilot out there--particularly the pilot we’ve drawn the TCA to keep out of the area--has a very difficult time with it,” he said. “One less able, less trained, is probably not going to be able to fathom this thing.”

To Vacar, ground training--in which pilots learn to interpret charts and understand airspace--has been particularly lacking. To others, the demands of Los Angeles have caused some instructors to stress navigational logistics at the expense of airmanship.

Newer pilots “are not trained to have a really good feel of the airplane,” Mason said. “They’re trained more to pass a flight test than to operate in the real world.”

In the wake of the Cerritos crash, some private pilots believe that their colleagues are taking greater pains to fly safely.

Several avionics manufacturers said their sales of encoding altimeters, which cost $700 to $800, have increased substantially.

“We used to sell about one a month. Now we sell about one a week,” said Jeff Hopkins, avionics manager for Vista Aviation Inc. near Whiteman Airport.

“I listen to the controllers and pilots talking,” Arobles said, “and just in the implications and types of services and radar contact they’ve been requesting, there is an underlying importance now to being in contact with the ground and spotting other traffic.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Leonel Sanchez and Hector Gutierrez.