Burbank Airport Rejects Noise-Sharing Demands

Saying safety must be paramount and politicians should stay out of the cockpit, Burbank Airport officials on Monday refused demands by Los Angeles political leaders and noise protesters that an effort be made to reroute more departing jetliners over the three cities that own the airport.

The decision, by a unanimous vote of the nine members of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority, drew strong protests from Los Angeles-based elected officials and predictions of a lawsuit.

Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents Sherman Oaks, called the commissioners’ action “typical of their high-handed insensitivity to the impacts that they have created over the San Fernando Valley.”

Yaroslavsky predicted that the dispute will be resolved “in the courts and not through constructive give and take. That’s the message that they’ve sent to the people of Los Angeles. They’d rather fight than switch.”

Almost all jetliners now climb for altitude over Los Angeles neighborhoods in the East Valley, bringing increasing complaints from residents there.

In response to the growing political power of neighborhood noise-protest groups, officeholders in the Los Angeles City Council, the Legislature and Congress have tried to find a way to make the authority adopt what they called a “fair-share” plan.

They wanted the airport authority to adopt a policy urging federal air-traffic controllers and airline pilots--who have the final say--to route departing planes toward the east at least half the time.

Pilots say they almost always take off toward the south, and circle to the west and north over the East Valley because that is the safest route for a number of reasons relating to the geography of the area and local air-traffic lanes.

“Safety is the fundamental issue,” said Commissioner David K. Robinson of Pasadena. “The evidence is overwhelming that we should leave things as they are.”

“This airport has been operating for over 50 years, and we’ve never had a major airline tragedy here,” said Commissioner Leland Ayers of Burbank.

“These guys in the cockpits are not nitwits. They have a lot of education in these things” and should not be under pressure to modify safety judgments, he said.

Ayers, a pilot whose light plane crashed at Whiteman Airport in Pacoima in July, said: “I can attest to the fact that as an airplane crashes, it makes a lot of noise.”

Ayers said that his engine had failed on takeoff. He said that if he had been trying to make a sharp turn at the same time--as the fair-share plan would require airline pilots to do--he probably would not have survived. As it was, he said he retained sufficient control and escaped with facial cuts and a broken finger.

“Noise is something that we can live with, and that we must live with,” he said.

Commissioner Brian Bowman of Burbank said it was not true, as Los Angeles protesters have maintained, that Burbank, Pasadena and Glendale benefit most from the airport while Los Angeles residents must suffer because of the noise.

Bowman said a survey showed that 44% of passengers passing through the airport are going to or coming from Los Angeles, compared with 14% to and from Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena. He said 23.5% of airport-generated jobs go to residents of the three cities, compared with 55% to residents of Los Angeles.

Commissioner Mary Lou Howard, a Burbank City Council member and former mayor, said that “shifting the noise to another area that has never been affected is not the answer.”

Commissioner Carl Meseck of Glendale said most protesters say they are bothered by the number of flights and are not impressed by reductions in the cumulative noise statistics on which state and federal noise laws are based.

Routing half the takeoffs to the east would annoy a whole new group of homeowners in that direction, without mollifying the current protesters to the west, Meseck said.

The airport has no takeoff-direction policy, and airport officials have argued repeatedly that under federal law and federal court rulings, they have no authority to intrude on decisions reserved to air-traffic controllers and pilots.

But the commissioners at least had to consider adopting such a policy. In addition to the pressure by Los Angeles-based officials, the commissioners were required to face the issue for an airport-noise study sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration and for state and federally required environmental impact reports needed for construction of a planned new terminal.

The environmental impact study will be based on expectations that 87% of jetliners will take off to the south and circle over the East Valley--and 3% will take off to the east--in the year 2000. By the same calculations, the amount of traffic at the airport is expected to increase by that time to 92,000 flights a year, an increase of 70% from the 54,000 flights last year.

Pilots say they prefer to take off to the south because the runway is 800 feet longer, slopes downhill and usually faces into the wind. The land south of the airport slopes away from a climbing plane, while a plane taking off to the east heads toward the Verdugo Mountains and must quickly bank to the south to avoid them, pilots say.

In addition, planes taking off to the east usually circle back to the west and north to avoid the San Gabriel Mountains and air-traffic control lanes that feed traffic into Los Angeles International Airport from the east.

A representative of City Councilman Joel Wachs said that Wachs--who was out of the city Monday--would continue to push for the fair-share plan. Wachs has been a leader in the fight for the plan.

Yaroslavsky said he was not surprised by the authority’s vote. “A share-the-noise-plan would impose a greater burden on their constituents than is currently imposed, and they can’t take the heat. They want us to take the heat.

“It is not safety question,” he said, arguing that planes took off to the east when the north-south runway was being renovated. “It is a political question.”

Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda) said the airport authority “needs to recognize that it’s going to take a cooperative attitude to ensure the future of Burbank Airport, and by telling everyone in Los Angeles, in effect, to just buzz off, they’re not ensuring that kind of attitude.”

Katz recently had the state Department of Transportation begin a review of Burbank Airport’s state operating permit. He noted that Caltrans also has authority over permits that the airport needs to construct the planned terminal.

“I’m not threatening them, but this is something we all need to work together on,” he said. “The people who live south and west of the airport aren’t going to just roll over and die. We’ll see what our options are, and Caltrans will be one of the options I’ll look at.

“The federal government has some say on the funding for that new terminal, and I know Congressman Berman is not going to be happy with this action today.”

At the urging of Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City), the House of Representatives passed a budget measure that would have prohibited the FAA from making certain grants to the airport authority unless it adopted a noise-sharing plan. The authority is depending on the grants to build the new terminal. The Berman measure died in a House-Senate conference committee.

Berman on Monday accused the airport commissioners of “using safety as a smoke screen to protect their constituents.” The noise protesters are calling for eastbound takeoffs only when pilots and the FAA judge them safe, he said.

At a special hearing last month, a representative of the Air Transport Assn., which represents commercial airlines, testified that 30% to 40% of flights could be routed safely to the east. A representative of the airline pilots union, however, testified that eastbound takeoffs would reduce safety.

Burbank City Atty. Douglas C. Holland urged the commissioners not to adopt the fair-share policy. “Who would you rather listen to?” he asked. “Those folks in the cockpits or the ones who are snug in corporate offices on the ground?”

John Ferraro, Los Angeles City Council president, said he hopes the authority will reconsider.

Airport spokesman Victor Gill said the airport will now look at measures to ease the effect of noise on residents, such as federally funded noise-proofing of homes, purchase of “noise easements” from property owners or a program to ensure homeowners against property-value loss because of airport noise.

Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this story.