Airport Off Huntington Beach Proposed : City Official Thinks L.A. Supervisor’s Suggestion Is All Wet

An old idea to float a commercial airport in the ocean for Orange County airline passengers who clog out-of-county airports has been revived, and this time the target is a site off Huntington Beach.

“I thought it was an April fool’s joke,” said Tom Mays, mayor pro tem of Huntington Beach. “I can’t imagine anybody in Orange County supporting this. We don’t consider it a serious alternative.”

Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana, irked by Orange County’s continuing inaction on selection of a second airport to handle the county’s overflow of airline passengers, proposed the floating airport off the Huntington Beach coast. This week, his colleagues on the Southern California Regional Airport Authority agreed to consider it.

“Frankly, it’s sheer desperation,” Dana said Thursday. “We don’t know what to do. Orange County is not taking responsibility. We have not been very happy about this for many years.”

Dana said an estimated 30% of the passengers using Los Angeles International Airport and Burbank Airport come from Orange County.

Crowded Airports

Airports in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties are all at or approaching maximum capacity or under noise restrictions, said Clifton Moore, head of the Los Angeles Department of Airports and executive director for the authority.

“Basically, we’re rapidly approaching the point where demand on airports exceeds what we can handle,” Moore said.

The new study, to be conducted by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, revives an old proposal to place a floating or platform--based airport in the Santa Catalina Channel off the Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor.

That $3.6-billion plan, studied in 1980, was rejected because of residents’ complaints and congestion already existing on the freeways out of Orange County that lead into Long Beach, Moore said.

Orange County officials Thursday dismissed the new study as a bad idea that simply floated south.

“It’s been studied before,” said Kenneth J. Delino, executive assistant for Newport Beach and director of the Intercounty Airport Authority. “It’s too expensive and somewhat impractical. It’s very similar to the Long Beach proposal, but the water is much deeper here and the currents stronger, which would just compound the problems.”

Called Pressure

Privately, one county airport official called the proposal to put runways and terminals off the county’s coastline a move “to put the screws on us. They want to establish an alternative so awful that we’ll be more cooperative on agreeing to any other site they propose.”

Orange County, despite repeated invitations to join the regional airport authority, has declined.

“We are very, very concerned and feel Orange County should participate,” Dana said. “They should become part of the solution, not the problem.”

Grounded by politics since the late 1960s, the search for a second airport to handle the overflow from John Wayne Airport has gone almost nowhere.

Twice the idea of an offshore airport for the county has been floated and quickly rejected--once in 1969 and again in 1984.

The 1984 proposal, by Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), called for an island-airport off of Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach that would have meant dredging three times the amount of earth moved to build the Panama Canal, at a cost of $5 billion for construction alone.

This latest offshore airport proposal comes just two weeks after an April Fool’s article in a Newport Beach publication on a secret plan to put an international airport in the ocean off Corona del Mar.