Badham Air Safety Forum Attracts 250 : Panel Hears Concerns on Crowded Skies, Military Crashes, Noise

A congressional forum about Orange County’s crowded skies drew a crowd of about 250 to a meeting hall at UC Irvine Friday, with speakers expressing anger and frustration over levels of air traffic safety.

Audience remarks at the forum, sponsored by Rep. Robert E. Badham (R-Newport Beach), focused on flights at John Wayne Airport and over residential areas.

A panel had been assembled that included current and former Federal Aviation Administration officials, the commanding general of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, civilian pilot representatives and the leader of Airport Working Group, an organization of homeowners concerned about noise and traffic at John Wayne. Audience questions ranged from subjects such as low-flying aircraft to police and military helicopter crashes to aircraft noise from planes that have been rerouted over Tustin because a high-rise near John Wayne Airport has blocked a key navigational signal.

Assurances Sought

One woman wondered aloud if “we’re trying to close the barn door after the horse is out.” Badham, who moderated the town hall-like gathering, conceded that the issue of air safety is a thorny and difficult one.

A few residents simply expressed fear about what they said were skies crowded with planes and asked for assurances about safety from panel members.

Some military aircraft fly so low, a Newport Beach woman said, that “we can practically see the blue in their eyes and the pimples on their chins.”

Brig. Gen. D. E. P. Miller, commanding general of the El Toro base, encouraged residents with complaints to report the incidents immediately.

David Banmiller, president of AirCal, the largest commercial user of John Wayne Airport, used slides to demonstrate the dense volume of incoming air traffic there and what he said was the need for all aircraft flying in the Southern California basin to be equipped with transponders that better tell controllers their location.

“You should know that we monitored only three frequencies over John Wayne Airport for four hours and counted the number of times aircraft arriving were told of aircraft in the area at ‘altitude unknown,’ ” Banmiller said. “This occurred 162 times in four hours.”

Banmiller urged support of a bill that Badham introduced Wednesday that would increase the area in which the use of transponders is required.

Panel member Joe Crotti, western regional representative for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., expressed opposition to Badham’s proposal, citing the cost of such devices to aircraft owners. But Banmiller said pilots who can afford $15,000 planes ought to be able to afford another $1,500 for a transponder.

Hope was offered by Homer C. McClure, the FAA’s western regional director, who listed efforts that the agency has been or will be making toward safety improvements. McClure said those efforts include an ambitious restructuring of airspace and the way it will be controlled, conducting “100 workshops to make the TCA (terminal control area, or regulated air space) simpler to pilots” and stepped up enforcement of pilot terminal control area violations.

“This system, the air system in this country, is the safest in the world, and we intend to keep it,” McClure said. Last year, he said, American air carriers had the lowest fatal accident rate since 1980, and commuter airlines had the lowest fatality rate since such records started being logged in 1975.

While air traffic has dramatically increased in the last year, McClure added, “operational errors by controllers” declined by 13%.

Cerritos Crash Not Included

Despite that optimistic tone, the crash last Aug. 31 of a commercial jet and a small private plane over Cerritos clearly had not been forgotten by Friday’s crowd. All 67 people aboard the two planes and at least 11 others on the ground were killed when an Aeromexico jet collided with the private plane. McClure noted that the deaths were not included in the year-end list of U.S. air fatalities because Aeromexico is not a domestic carrier.

Those who attended the forum were greeted outside by a small band of demonstrators carrying signs protesting U.S. involvement in Central America. The group was not allowed entrance to the university hall, however, and did not disrupt the meeting until the end of the forum, when their chants of “Talk of safety, money for bombs, Robert Badham wants more Vietnams” filtered into the meeting room. They were shouted down by most audience members.

One or two of about 16 protesters from a campus group of students and teachers called Latin American Solidarity Network, who held signs and a wooden coffin outside the hall, sneaked into the session individually before it concluded.