Airports in Our Future

Airline passengers throughout the West can thank the voters of Adams County, Colo., for making things easier for them in coming years. The Denver suburb agreed last week to allow the city and county of Denver to annex 45 square miles of Adams County land for the construction of a new Denver airport now scheduled to go into operation in 1993. The new facility ultimately could have 12 runways handling as many as 100 million arriving and departing passengers a year, compared with the present traffic of more than 45 million at Los Angeles International.

Denver’s will be the first major new airport in the nation since 1974, and it is the only one currently being planned. Denver is the major hub for flights throughout the West, and bad weather there now often limits runway operations, with a domino effect throughout the nation. At present, a flight takes off from one of the Los Angeles-area airports for Denver’s Stapleton Field every 20 minutes during the peak hours of the day.

The action in Colorado raises the question of what the Los Angeles area is doing about airport expansion. The Regional Airport Authority and the Southern California Assn. of Governments are conducting a two-stage assessment of airport needs and possible solutions. The study is focusing not just on an airport’s ability to handle airplane traffic but on ground access as well. Passenger capacity can be added at some airports by using larger aircraft making the same number of flights. At other airports it is possible to increase the number of flights. The use of quieter aircraft may increase the capacity at some airports where noise standards now limit the numbers of incoming and outgoing planes. All such actions, however, add to congestion and traffic on the ground. The Regional Airport Authority consists of the Los Angeles Department of Airports and Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Unfortunately, Orange County has chosen to go it alone on airport planning, but the regional authority is working with the Airport Site Coalition in Orange County. Orange County does have expansion under way at John Wayne Airport that will nearly double its capacity to about 8.4 million passengers annually.

Los Angeles International already has exceeded its original design capacity of about 40 million passengers, but demand is expected to reach about 65 million by the end of the century and can be met by additional flights, experts say. Access will be helped by the opening of the Century Freeway, but the ultimate constraint at LAX still is expected to be congestion on the ground and not the ability to handle airplanes.

A massive facility at Palmdale no longer is considered to be the ultimate solution to the region’s commercial air-traffic problems, although some sort of airport there still is being considered. There are plans to expand Ontario to its limit of about 12 million passengers a year. Planners believe that three or four other satellite airports will be required to handle the region’s growth and demand in the next two decades.

Los Angeles is not like Denver: There is no single big fix for this region’s air-travel problems. The solution will be incremental, and it will require the resolution of many problems both in the air and on the ground, along with the cooperation of public and private organizations throughout the area, and possibly the voters.