FAA Will Reroute Jets at L.A. Area Airports : New Controller Procedures Also Due in Effort to Better Separate Commercial, Private Planes

Hoping to improve air safety while reducing congestion in the skies, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday that it will implement broad changes in the routes that funnel jetliners into Los Angeles area airports and the procedures air traffic controllers use to guide the aircraft.

The planned changes--the first part of a three-phase FAA plan to “restructure” controlled airspace throughout Southern California--come six months after an Aeromexico DC-9 collided over Cerritos with a single-engine private plane. Eighty-two people died in the accident.

“We have searched for ways to improve safety by reducing pockets of congested airspace and thereby minimizing the potential for midair collisions,” said H.C. (Mac) McClure, the FAA’s regional administrator.

Coastal Route

One of the more significant actions announced Monday will result in the abandonment of the coastal approach route that Aeromexico Flight 498 was flying last Aug. 31 when the midair collision took place.

Using a new route, jetliners heading toward Los Angeles International Airport from San Diego and points south will first turn inland at Oceanside and fly toward the Pomona area, more than 20 miles northeast of Cerritos. There, at an altitude no lower than 15,000 feet (the Cerritos crash occurred at 6,589 feet), the jets will bank left and begin descending toward Los Angeles International Airport.

About 120 commercial and business aircraft currently fly the route over Cerritos each day. Rerouted to the east and flying higher, they will more easily avoid potential contact with the hundreds of small planes based at airports along the Orange and Los Angeles County coasts, FAA officials said.

The FAA also announced plans to add a new approach path for many of the 750 airliners that fly into Los Angeles area airports each day from the north and northwest.

All of the jets currently travel a single flight path that takes them over Fillmore, northeast of Ventura. The new route will cull out Los Angeles International-bound airliners before they reach Fillmore and carry them on a path that roughly parallels the coast, overflying Point Mugu.

The new approach routes will smooth the current “bunching” of airliners and help reduce arrival delays, according to Wayne Newcomb, the FAA’s regional air traffic manager. Each of the additional routes is expected to be implemented within 18 months, along with other changes detailed on Monday. Those changes include:

- Shifting some routing and tracking tasks currently handled by controllers in Palmdale--the local hub of the FAA’s air traffic control network--to controllers in four outlying centers, called terminal radar approach control facilities (TRACON). The shift is primarily intended to reduce the “complexity factor” faced by controllers each time an aircraft flies from one block of airspace into another, Newcomb said.

- Extending to 13,000 feet the vertical limit of airspace monitored by air traffic controllers throughout Southern California. In some areas, radar controllers currently only monitor planes flying up to 6,000 feet, while other controllers handle higher-flying aircraft in the same sector. The situation, controllers contend, creates confusion among some pilots and FAA personnel alike. While this change will have little impact on pilots, it will help simplify the boundaries of the airspace sectors assigned to individual controllers, according to air traffic experts.

- Possibly limiting to 250 knots (287.5 m.p.h.) the speed of aircraft leaving Los Angeles area airports. Reducing speeds could help controllers better sequence jetliners leaving the area, thereby reducing departure delays that often occur when swifter planes are ordered to wait before taking off because they could overtake already airborne aircraft, FAA officials said.

The plan detailed Monday to expand and revise Los Angeles’ air traffic routes is similar to air route changes the FAA is making on the East Coast, where takeoff delays, particularly in New York, have become chronic because of airspace congestion.

To deal with the congestion, the FAA has established terminal control areas, highly restricted, massive and often confusing chunks of airspace that are primarily intended to separate large aircraft from smaller ones over most major U.S. cities.

McClure said the second and third phases of the FAA’s plan to restructure Southern California’s airspace deal specifically with a potential reconfiguration and simplification of the Los Angeles terminal control area. Agency officials hope to publish notices in the Federal Register within 30 days to begin that process, he said.

Any modification of the terminal control area will probably not be implemented before 1988, McClure and others said.

Aviation Community

The plans announced Monday were based on recommendations made over the past two years by dozens of representatives from throughout the aviation community who attended a series of FAA-sponsored forums. The participants were asked to evaluate problems in the skies over the Los Angeles area, where 22% of the nation’s air traffic is found.

Word of the the FAA’s plans brought mostly favorable response from pilots and air traffic controllers. The mayor of Cerritos, Don Knabe, also expressed pleasure, saying residents have been pushing the FAA to move the approach path well east of their community.

However, Karl Grundmann, western Pacific region representative of the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn., which is attempting to unionize controllers, said that while the plans to change the flight routes and adjusting responsibilities between the Palmdale center and the TRACONs seem sound, none of the changes will make a difference unless the FAA sharply increases the personnel staffing at these centers and speeds installation of new radar equipment.

Grundmann, a controller at Los Angeles TRACON, said it simply cannot take on more responsibilities unless it receives more controllers. The facility handles the approach and departure routes for the more than 1,700 flights, carrying more than 100,000 passengers that take off and land at Los Angeles International every day.

“L.A. TRACON is supposed to have 44 people. We have somewhere around 30,” Grundmann said.

Additional Workers

FAA officials said Monday that they had not yet determined how many additional workers may be needed to put the planned changes into effect.

Meanwhile, in a related development Monday, three cardiologists who studied the health of William Kramer, the private pilot whose Piper Archer collided with the Aeromexico jet over Cerritos, said they were unable to reach agreement on whether he had suffered a heart attack during flight.

One of the doctors said he believed changes in Kramer’s heart muscle were caused by a heart attack, but the two others disagreed.

Kramer was described by associates as a careful pilot and the possibility of a heart attack was raised as one reason why he flew into the terminal control area without authorization and without making radio contact with controllers.

No Evidence

Soon after the crash, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Kramer had suffered a heart attack. However, an autopsy subsequently conducted by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for the National Transportation Safety Board found severe hardening of the arteries but no evidence that a heart attack had occurred.

A report released Monday by the Board of Supervisors said that the three cardiologists who reviewed the case at the request of the coroner’s office agreed that Kramer suffered from “severe” heart disease. However, the doctors believed that his condition “probably did not” play a cause in the crash, the report said.