County May Pay FAA for Air Tower

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday to investigate the cost of paying the Federal Aviation Administration to install and operate a control tower at county-owned Whiteman Airport in Pacoima.

The supervisors approved a resolution to instruct the county’s chief administrative officer to contact the FAA “and explore the possibility of operating a tower at Whiteman Airport on a contract basis.”

The board has been trying for months to convince the FAA to put a tower at Whiteman, the only airport in the San Fernando Valley where pilots land and take off without the aid of ground controllers.

The supervisors have cited safety concerns caused by air traffic from Whiteman in the area of Burbank and Van Nuys airports. Van Nuys, the busiest general aviation airport in the United States, is about five miles away. Only about a mile separates one end of Whiteman’s runway from a Burbank runway.

The supervisors’ campaign gained impetus in January when it was revealed that the pilot of a Continental Airlines DC-9 jetliner mistook Whiteman for Burbank Airport and came within 800 feet of landing there before the Burbank tower warned him of the mistake.

Runway Too Small

Whiteman is designed to handle light planes. Airport officials said the Continental airliner’s landing gear is too wide to fit on the runway at Whiteman, and the jetliner’s weight would have pushed the landing gear through the runway’s comparatively thin paving, virtually assuring that the plane would have spun out of control.

After the incident, the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority joined the supervisors in calling for a Whiteman tower. State Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys) and Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda) introduced measures asking the state Legislature to back the appeal.

The FAA has said an airport needs 200,000 takeoffs and landings a year to justify the cost of a control tower. Whiteman had about 150,000 takeoffs and landings in 1985 and 1986.

An FAA spokeswoman said “it would take an act of Congress to deviate from the established guidelines,” and the board of supervisors appealed to Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) to introduce legislation.

Tower proponents argue that the number of takeoffs and landings is not as important as Whiteman’s proximity to other airports.

A spokesman for Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who introduced Tuesday’s proposal, said Antonovich traveled to Washington recently to talk with FAA officials, who suggested that they would consider operating the tower under a contract with the county.