Palmdale Airport Plans Still in Holding Pattern

Just outside Palmdale, 36 square miles of empty Mojave Desert stretch from a cluster of runways and aerospace plants to the hills on the horizon.

Coyotes and the Mojave green rattlesnake live there undisturbed except for the occasional roar of advanced--sometimes top-secret--airplanes from the U.S. Air Force base next door. Occasionally, the serenity is shattered by “turf wars” between sheepherders competing for the scrubby brush that grows between ruined foundations of scattered houses demolished more than 15 years ago.

This empire of sand is a monument to the undying dream of the Los Angeles Department of Airports, which still hopes to build a vast airport on the site someday.

The proposed airport has been scaled back since 1968, when the department announced plans for a “superport” for supersonic, intercontinental jetliners, plans which eventually came to nothing.

But in an era when complaints of a national airport shortage are growing, there is no doubt that someday Los Angeles will have an airport there, department officials insist. Conversely, even some members of the city Board of Airport Commissioners, which sets policy for the department, doubt that much will happen until well into the 21st Century.

In the meantime, the department has poured more than $100 million into acquiring and maintaining 17,750 acres of desert, a strip 9 miles long and 4 miles wide at points. The projected airport would be five times the size of Los Angeles International and the second-largest U.S. airport, surpassed only by the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport.

The city of Los Angeles has paid Los Angeles County $8.9 million in property taxes in the last 17 years and the bill is running $750,000 a year, the airport department says.

Airport officials maintain that a Palmdale airport would reduce traffic at Burbank and Van Nuys, but they say there is no question of eliminating any airports.

According to some studies, “even with every airport in Southern California operating at full capacity, and a Palmdale airport open and handling 12 million passengers a year, we would still need yet another airport,” said airport department spokeswoman Virginia Black.

These are the kinds of pressures that will eventually force airlines and the city to begin using Palmdale, insists Clifton Moore, executive director of the Department of Airports.

As recently as 1978, LAX planning was based on estimates of a top capacity of 40 million passengers a year, Black said. That number was surpassed in 1986, and last year LAX handled 44.8 million. Current projections are based on an estimated load of 65 million passengers by 2000, she said.

In the absence of an airport in Palmdale, the department makes whatever money it can on its desert land. It leases the land for uses from manufacturing to farming and sheep grazing, and made $1.2 million on it last year. Occasionally, sheepherders whose employers have paid the city for grazing rights--$1 an acre per year--chase off other herders who sneak onto the land, according to Jim Bort, the manager of the site for the department.

The Department of Airports also runs an experimental farm to determine which crops will withstand the high desert’s blazing hot summer days and freezing winter nights. It raises, among other crops, pistachio nuts, which are distributed at department social affairs, packaged in jars with the department’s logo.

Two acres are planted in guayule bushes, a desert plant from which rubber can be extracted.

Why the originally announced jetport was never built is a complicated tale involving money, the San Andreas Fault, demographics, the airline business, a high-speed train and the U.S. Air Force.

Complicating the present is the fact that the city of Los Angeles already has a Palmdale airport of sorts.

Bordering the west side of the department’s desert tract is a 6,000-acre installation usually called “Air Force Plant 42,” but which includes the Palmdale Air Terminal, a deserted civilian airport built by Los Angeles. It has a terminal and taxiways, but has no airline service or passengers.

Lockheed, Northrop and Rockwell have plants there or on the neighboring Department of Airports land, some working on classified projects.

The Air Force has long opposed the city’s plans for a giant commercial airport at the site.

Air Force spokesmen said the military does not want commercial traffic using some of the airspace now reserved for military test flights and combat practice.

Ironically, Plant 42 was once a Los Angeles County airport, acquired in 1947 but sold back to the Air Force in 1954. The city built the civilian passenger terminal in 1971, and briefly operated it for the city of Palmdale.

The Air Force agreed to allow Los Angeles to share Air Force Plant 42, reopening the civilian air terminal. In return, the city promised not to build an airport until commercial air traffic exhausted the capacity of the present airport. Air Force officers said the military uses only 25% of the airfield’s capacity and confidently predict that “it may never fill up,” forestalling any construction on the city’s land far into the future.

Los Angeles originally opened the Palmdale Air Terminal, a 9,000-square-foot building on 54 acres leased from the Air Force, in June, 1971. One of its goals was to “establish a pattern of airline service into the Antelope Valley.” It didn’t happen.

One after another, three airlines offered service there, mostly commuter flights to Los Angeles. In 1978, 36,000 passengers used the terminal. But after that, traffic fell to between 12,000 and 20,000 a year until airline service ceased in 1983.

The Department of Airports complains that the Air Force, which runs the control tower, reduced its operations to daytime office hours, effectively squeezing out commuter flights.

The Palmdale airport was conceived in the late 1950s, Moore said, although it was not endorsed by the Board of Airport Commissioners until August, 1968.

The airport was to be operating by the mid-1970s, but obstacles in its path multiplied by the month.