Airport Foes Arming for War Over Helicopter Shuttle : What an opportunity for yet another re-enactment of the last scene from the old Frankenstein movies.

The opera’s not over till the fat lady sings.

--Dick Motta, former coach, Washington Bullets

The fat lady never sings at Van Nuys Airport, where every few years history repeats itself.

Periodically, it occurs to someone, usually someone who wants to be in the airline business, that there is a large, busy, modern airfield that offers no scheduled passenger service in the midst of a market of 1.5-million people.

What an opening for a flying entrepreneur. What a chance for conveniently close-at-hand service for frequent air travelers, maddened by the freeway crawl to Los Angeles International Airport.

And what an opportunity for yet another re-enactment of the last scene from the old Frankenstein movies, in which mobs of enraged villagers flock to the doctor’s castle and conduct an environmental impact review on the monster with pitchforks and torches.

Don’t look now, but lights are flickering in the doctor’s laboratory window again.

The subject of passenger service at the airport, the cause of repeated homeowners’ revolts for more than a quarter of a century, has risen anew.

But part of the debate is a quarrel over whether the controversy actually involves scheduled passenger service, currently forbidden by city policy because of the past protests. The airport is reserved for use by “general aviation”--private and corporate planes, flight schools, charter carriers and the military.

L.A. Helicopters, a passenger-carrying service that operates between Burbank Airport and LAX, wants to add Van Nuys Airport to its routes.

And eventually to add stops in Universal City and Warner Center in Woodland Hills.

The prospective service is many months away, if the operators can clear all the environmental and legal hurdles, but the villagers are already sharpening their pitchforks.

The Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners, which meets in the San Fernando Valley at least once or twice a year to hear Valley issues and complaints, has a meeting scheduled tonight at the Airtel Plaza Hotel at Van Nuys Airport. Homeowners and anti-noise groups are trying to drum up a large turnout to protest the proposed helicopter service and other airport measures they complain are hazardous and increase aircraft noise.

L.A. Helicopters has applied to the city Department of Airports for permission to make Van Nuys Airport an “on-demand” additional stop for its hourly service linking LAX and Burbank Airport. The six-passenger, jet-powered helicopters would stop there only if a passenger was on hand, asking to be picked up, or if a passenger who boarded at one of the other airports requested to be dropped off there.

Whether this constitutes “scheduled commercial passenger service” is one of the main issues in the controversy.

“The airport’s position is that this would not be a scheduled operation, so that would not violate current practice,” said airport spokesman Bob Hayes.

“This is just a ploy by the Department of Airports to get around the ban on scheduled service,” said Gerald Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, one of the main homeowners’ groups involved in protesting airport noise.

“This is even more obnoxious and egregious than scheduled service. With scheduled service, the chopper might come, say, on the hour. But with on-demand service, it will be back on the half-hour, too, if there are enough passengers waiting.”

“They’d be on a schedule on which they would offer to pick up passengers, so what’s the difference?” asked Don Schultz, head of Ban Airport Noise, a homeowners’ group formed to combat noise from Van Nuys and Burbank airports.

“It’s so close to being scheduled commercial service they should just call it what it is, but if they did that, they’d have to immediately deny” the company’s request because of the ban on such service at Van Nuys Airport, he argued.

The new service would not only breach the longstanding policy against using the airport for anything but general aviation, but would add to the helicopter noise problem that neighbors have been complaining about for years, Schultz said.

If the service wins approval, the number of flights would depend on how much business it attracts, a subject of speculation by both sides of the debate.

An agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration, under which helicopter pilots are urged to use only specified routes approaching and leaving the airport--primarily over freeways or following industrialized Stagg or Saticoy streets--”is not working,” Schultz said.

“The helicopter pilots just take shortcuts over our neighborhoods,” he said.

Gordon Myers, president of L.A. Helicopters, said he did not foresee a large number of Van Nuys Airport flights--”maybe three or four a day.”

He estimated that the service would be used by about a dozen passengers a day, divided between early-morning departures and evening returns, with little traffic in between.

Actually, he said, the company, which began operating between LAX and Burbank 13 months ago, also has been flying passengers in and out of Van Nuys Airport on that route “for the past six or eight months.” He said the company’s helicopters are the quietest available.

These have been classified as charter operations, which do not require approval from the Department of Airports. They were “just like any other charter carrier at Van Nuys,” utilizing the same aircraft that fly the scheduled route, he said, often dropping or picking up passengers at the Airtel Plaza.

“There were maybe a dozen in the past six months or so, not real heavy,” Myers said. “But we’d prefer to come into Van Nuys Airport honest and open.”

Drop Cost to $65

One motive is that the number of passengers attracted on a charter basis is bound to be small because of the price involved--$195 for a one-way ticket to either airport, he said. Approval to operate as an “on-demand” carrier would provide enough business to allow the company to drop the cost to the $65 now charged for a full-fare, one-way ticket between LAX and Burbank Airport, he said. In addition, some airlines would pay a portion, or all, of the helicopter fare if the passenger buys a ticket on one of their flights, he said.

Myers said he sees his company as competition for taxi and limousine services. Taxis from Valley communities to LAX cost in the neighborhood of $30 to $45. Limousines cost about $40 to $60.

L.A. Helicopters also links LAX with hotels in the City of Commerce and the City of Industry and by charter into a heliport in Pasadena.

The company is also negotiating to serve Universal City and Warner Center, he said. He declined to name the parties involved in Warner Center “because, politically, it’s just too delicate.” At Universal City, he said, talks are going on with MCA, the entertainment conglomerate. MCA spokesmen were unavailable for comment.

Myers said his plans call for direct flights between LAX and Warner Center, while Universal City would be added to the proposed LAX-Burbank-Van Nuys loop. The Los Angeles City Council would have to approve permits for both sites, he said, but he hopes to have the service at both places operating by the spring.

The company is also negotiating for service points in downtown Los Angeles and Anaheim, he said.

Public Comments

The Van Nuys Airport proposal is in the initial stages of a 45-day environmental review that began Sept. 17, during which the Department of Airports will record comments from the public, said Gary Brown, a planner with the department’s environmental management bureau.

The company submitted a draft study for an environmental statement in June, which the department rejected because the study concluded that the company’s service would have no environmental impact, Brown said. Following the initial comment period, which expires Nov. 8, the department will prepare a draft environmental impact report, which will take until February or March, he said. The draft may include suggestions “for certain limits in the scope of the project, or mitigation measures,” he said.

After that, the draft will be made available for public review and comment for 30 days, a public hearing will be held and a final environmental report will be written, probably in May. The matter will then go to the Board of Airport Commissioners for a decision, Brown said.

Foes of the proposed service hope to use the lengthy review process to kill it, as repeated attempts to use Van Nuys Airport for scheduled passenger service have been killed in the past.

In 1956, only six years after the federal government gave the World War II military field to the city, airport officials said they hoped to attract airline users, and offered to build a passenger terminal for the first airline that secured federal and state permits to service the airfield.

In the early 1960s, a company called Future Airlines tried to take them up on the offer, proposing a service linking LAX with Van Nuys, San Jose, San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. But angry protests from neighbors killed the proposal. In the mid-’60s, Transcal Airlines briefly linked Van Nuys with Visalia, but met the same fate.

Battle Before PUC

In 1967 and 1968, an application by Air Metropolitan to use the airport as a base for five round-trips daily to San Francisco set off a lengthy battle before the state Public Utilities Commission, which then regulated intrastate flights. Homeowners flooded 14 state hearings, gathered more than 30,000 signatures on petitions and hammered members of the City Council and then-Mayor Sam Yorty with so many complaints that even council members who had originally encouraged airline use of the airport recanted.

The Board of Airport Commissioners responded with the policy statement banning scheduled commercial passenger traffic from the field.

The policy has stood ever since, the foundation of the increasingly uneasy compact between airport administrators and their neighbors.

In 1975, when fears mounted that Burbank Airport--then owned by the Lockheed aircraft company--would close, airline executives appealed to city officials to allow Van Nuys to replace it, complaining that LAX was becoming too congested. City officials, the memory of the 1967 homeowner rebellion still bright, refused.

When a charter carrier tried to operate a scheduled airline out of a restaurant with runway access during a PSA strike in 1980, airport officials pressured the service out of existence.

The echoes of the 1967 homeowners’ mobilization against Air Metropolitan have not yet died away. Some of the leaders and most dedicated foot troops of the anti-noise groups now gearing up to keep L.A. Helicopters from servicing Van Nuys Airport first became involved in the issue 20 years ago, and have remained involved.