Helicopter Shuttle Drops Van Nuys Expansion Bid

Under a barrage of opposition from city officials and homeowners’ groups, the owner of a passenger helicopter service Wednesday withdrew plans to expand service at Van Nuys Airport.

But Gordon Myers, president of LA Helicopter, said he will continue sporadic flights at customer request and might begin flying from the roof of a Sherman Oaks office building instead.

Homeowners jammed a meeting of the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners Tuesday night to protest plans by LA Helicopter to promote Van Nuys Airport as an “on-demand” addition to its service linking Los Angeles International Airport and Burbank Airport. They complained about the noise they said the service would generate.

The five commissioners warned Myers that they “have grave concerns” about such a service.

City Councilman Joel Wachs told a cheering crowd of noise protesters that approval of the helicopter service’s plans would “open the door to commercial air service at this airport and abandon the longtime understanding that this airport would be reserved for private uses.”

‘Break Faith’

It would “change the whole nature of the airport” and “totally break faith with the community,” Wachs charged.

Scheduled commercial air service has been banned from the airport since the late 1960s because of previous homeowner protests.

However, part of the dispute over the LA Helicopter request concerns fine points in the legal definitions of scheduled, commercial service and charter, or “on-demand,” service, which is permitted at Van Nuys Airport.

Myers said Wednesday that he is withdrawing his application for board approval of his service.

Wachs had told the crowd Tuesday night that he would move to have the council block the service at the airport, but a spokesman for his office said Wednesday that Wachs will not introduce such a motion because he is “declaring victory.” A representative of Councilman Marvin Braude said Braude, who also represents the San Fernando Valley, would have supported Wachs’ motion.

Myers said, however, that withdrawal of the application did not mean that his helicopters would not service passengers at Van Nuys Airport, but that “we will not proceed with any plans to expand beyond what we’re already doing.”

Request by Passengers

For six months, he said, his service has offered to drop off or pick up passengers at Van Nuys Airport, at the passengers’ request, on the LAX-Burbank Airport route. That counts as a charter operation, which needs no approval from the city because it is no different from the dozens of other charter flights that land at and take off from the airport each day, he contends.

Noise critics argued that the service is a thinly disguised scheduled operation because LA Helicopter offers hourly flights between the other two airports, and the same aircraft make Van Nuys pickups and drop-offs.

In his speech to the commissioners, Wachs said, “If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck and walks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”

However, the manager of the Department of Airports, Clifton Moore, countered that “the issue is not that clear-cut” because of LA Helicopter’s ambiguous status.

The dispute over whether LA Helicopter offers an “on-demand” charter flight or scheduled service involves its license from the Federal Aviation Administration, which authorizes the airline to do both, said Assistant City Atty. Breton K. Lobner, legal counsel to the commissioners.

Technically, as both Breton and Myers described it, when a passenger asks to be picked up or dropped off at Van Nuys Airport, LA Helicopter cancels its scheduled flight between Burbank Airport and LAX. Instead, the airline then flies a charter flight with a stop at Van Nuys--with the same aircraft, carrying the same passengers, at the same fare.

Under federal regulations, passengers who bought tickets on a regularly scheduled flight can protest to the FAA, which can discipline an airline for failure to fulfill its schedule. However, Myers said, passengers on his flights rarely protest the brief diversion, and, if any do, the scheduled flight goes ahead as planned and the airline dispatches a separate helicopter to Van Nuys.

Under FAA regulations, LA Helicopter is entitled to cancel flights, and to operate both charter and scheduled service with the same aircraft, Lobner said, and city airport authorities cannot legally discriminate against one operator in a class, such as charter operators.

Partly on those grounds, Lobner counseled the commissioners against passing a resolution--which Wachs had requested--specifically rejecting LA Helicopter’s request for approval of its service. Instead, commissioners unanimously passed a resolution expressing “grave concern about . . . mixed-use helicopter operation.”

Special Category?

After the commission meeting, Lobner said his office “will look into whether this may be a special category of carrier that violates the board’s resolution” against scheduled commercial flights.

Myers’ request to the Department of Airports was to operate an “on-demand” service at Van Nuys Airport, essentially the same service he has been offering and said he will continue to offer. However, he said, he will abandon plans to obtain a regular terminal for LA Helicopter passengers, advertise the service and expand it, as he intended to do if he had won approval.

But loss of the volume of passengers he had hoped for will force him to raise the charter fare from $65, the cost of a one-way ticket between the other two airports, he said.

Myers said he is looking into an offer to use a heliport at the Sherman Oaks Galleria on Ventura Boulevard because “I’d just as soon serve the Valley out of Sherman Oaks as upset the political structure.”

A spokesman for the Galleria said that the shopping mall has a heliport atop its 14-story office tower.