DC-9 Jetliner Nearly Landed at Tiny Field Near Burbank

The pilot of a DC-9 jetliner mistook tiny Whiteman Air Park in Pacoima for nearby Burbank Airport last month and came within a few hundred feet of landing there, the Federal Aviation Administration and airport workers revealed Monday.

The report recalled a similar incident last year in which an airline pilot on a landing approach to Los Angeles International Airport lined up by mistake on the runway of Hawthorne Airport but pulled up in time.

Such erroneous approaches to Whiteman by Burbank-bound jetliners have “happened three or four times before,” in the last four years, said Jean Granucci, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, which operates Whiteman.

“But this was the lowest,” she added.

Landing Gear Down

Granucci said the airliner is believed to have descended to below 400 feet, with landing gear deployed, before it pulled up.

Gerald C. Walton, manager of the FAA control tower at the Burbank Airport, said the plane is believed to have been at an altitude of about 800 feet when the pilot was advised of his error and aborted the landing.

An air traffic controller in the Burbank tower, who was in radio contact with the pilot, was worried that the pilot “was lower than he should be,” until the controller realized that the pilot appeared to be too low because he was heading into the wrong airport, Walton said.

“The pilot was apparently not familiar with this area,” Walton said.

Spokesmen for Whiteman and McDonnell Douglas Corp., which built the DC-9, said that not only is Whiteman’s runway perhaps too short to land such a large plane, but that the aircraft weighs at least eight times as much as Whiteman’s pavement was designed to support. They feared the landing gear would have plowed through the asphalt and snapped off, throwing the jetliner out of control alongside busy San Fernando Road.

Close Call in Hawthorne

Last May, a United Air Lines 747 from Honolulu bound for Los Angeles International Airport began making a landing approach to Hawthorne Airport, also designed for light planes, 2 1/2 miles away, but pulled up after descending to between 500 and 1,100 feet.

Whiteman--used mostly by privately owned, single-engine propeller planes--is about five miles north of the Burbank Airport. The southern edge of its one runway is only about three miles north of the northern end of one of Burbank’s two runways.

Whiteman has no control tower, and is the only airport in the San Fernando Valley where pilots land and take off by eyesight alone, without the help of controllers on the ground.

The FAA is investigating the incident, said Walton, who would not reveal the airline involved, other than to say it was “not PSA or Air Cal,” which have many flights out of Burbank. Three other airlines that fly regularly out of the airport employ DC-9s.

Walton revealed the incident at a regular meeting of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority, the airport’s governing body. The commissioners had asked him for his opinion on a suggestion that the FAA install a control tower at Whiteman. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last month urged the FAA to install such a tower and the commissioners are considering whether to go on record in support of the supervisors.

Walton told the commissioners there was “no question safety would be enhanced” by such a tower, which might have prevented several close calls in the air over the San Fernando Valley recently.

As an example, he cited the jetliner’s mistaken approach to Whiteman. As another, he said that during the weekend a jetliner pilot making a landing approach to Burbank had to descend from 3,000 feet--his proper altitude--to 1,500 feet and into the pattern of small planes approaching Whiteman to avoid another aircraft that was improperly at his altitude.

The other aircraft was not identified, he said, and the FAA is also investigating that incident.

The Whiteman runway is about 3,950 feet long, said the airport manager, John Lounsberry.

That is in the area of the minimum length needed to land a DC-9, said Elayne Bendel, a spokeswoman for McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach. However, both Bendel and Lounsberry said they were more concerned about the inability of the Whiteman runway to support the weight of the plane. A DC-9 weighs about 100,000 pounds, Bendel said, with the stretched MD-80 model weighing up to 160,000 pounds.

The one-inch-thick asphalt runway at Whiteman is not designed to handle planes heavier than 12,000 pounds, Lounsberry said.

If the plane had landed, he said, the runway would not have been wide enough for both its landing gears. “One side would have been in the dirt and the other would have just rolled up the asphalt and when enough asphalt piled up in front of those wheels, he’d lose the landing gear,” and the plane would swing out of control, he said.

The airport’s runway runs alongside San Fernando Road.

“I’ll say one thing,” Lounsberry said. “Even if anyone ever manages to land one of those things here, it’s going to be a one-way trip. They’ll have to dismantle the aircraft to get it out of here.”