Touch-and-Go Ban at Van Nuys Airport

There is a great deal of support for a ban on touch-and-go landings on weekends and evenings at Van Nuys Airport.

This ban would be welcome to anyone who lives near the airport. It is an anachronism in the 1980s. Would anyone suggest locating the world’s busiest general aviation airport smack in the center of a highly urbanized area? They would be laughed out of town!

Van Nuys Airport generates a tremendous amount of noise at all hours of the day and night. Jets thunder out of the airport in the early-morning hours. There is an incessant drone from repeated touch-and-go flights. Forty-three percent of the airport’s operations involve training. That’s right: Almost half of the operations at Van Nuys Airport involve green pilots scrambling for the limited airspace over our heads in which to practice. It’s insane! A Cerritos-type disaster over the Valley is just waiting to happen.

Let me make several points clear. We are not against private aviation, recreational flying or pilot training. But pilots should not be allowed to fly over any populated area until they have adequate training and experience. The issue is not whether pilots should have touch-and-go training. Rather, the question is where this training should occur. Surely there are better places than the skies over the crowded San Fernando Valley.

Some pilots have suggested that air accidents are unavoidable. That is probably true and is the best argument for moving touch-and-go training away from highly populated areas.

Residents are not paranoid. One has only to recall the accident in June, 1981, when two planes collided over the Sherman Oaks Galleria. Had they crashed a few feet to the south into the crowded theater, we would have had a disaster exceeding the Cerritos crash. Our fears are obviously well-founded.

The next time you hear a light plane buzzing over the Valley, think about the fact that the odds are it is a pilot in training, with perhaps 50 hours behind the stick, learning his craft at our peril.

GERALD A. SILVER

Encino

Silver is president of Homeowners of Encino.