Sky’s the Limit When You Want to Avoid Traffic : Scheduled Long Beach-L.A. Flight Cuts Down 17-Mile Travel Time

Frazzled at the thought of facing the bumper-to-bumper commute down the San Diego Freeway?

Find flaws with such ecological alternatives as the car pool or such pricey fare as the taxi?

Well, you can always take a plane. Among the 89 far-flung cities listed in a new American Airlines ad campaign for summer discount fare destinations from Los Angeles International Airport is one just 17 miles away: Long Beach.

Fact is, it might be cheaper to rent a stretch limousine.

American reservations clerks will tell you that the least-expensive, round-trip coach price for the intra-county flight is $85. That’s $7 more than the fare to San Diego, San Francisco or San Jose.

What’s more, to qualify, passengers must comply with the same restrictions on the Long Beach-to-Los Angeles jaunt as they would taking a 2,475-mile transcontinental trip to New York City.

Specifically, tickets must be purchased two weeks in advance and travelers from Los Angeles must stay overnight in Long Beach at least one Saturday.

$134 Price Prevails

Otherwise, the airline said, the trip costs $134.

Few passengers pay full fare, American officials said, inasmuch as the twice-daily flights on the 15- and 19-passenger commuter propjets operated by the airline’s American Eagle subsidiary are offered primarily as a feeder service for travelers making connections with long-distance flights in Los Angeles.

But there are exceptions.

“I recently had someone coming into LAX from a long flight who looked down and saw the 405 Freeway was an absolute disaster,” said David Michel, a passenger service supervisor for American Eagle. “When he landed, he threw his credit card down and paid me $67 for a one-way flight to Long Beach.”

Couriers dismayed by heavy freeway traffic also occasionally make use of the service, according to American officials.

American is the only major airline that flies between Los Angeles and Long Beach. The concise route is not the shortest scheduled by a major commercial carrier--that title goes to United for its once-daily, 11-mile run over the bay between San Francisco and Oakland. But Long Beach-Los Angeles is apparently the briefest over land, besting a TWA route between Burbank and Long Beach by nine air miles.

“The record time from Long Beach to LAX,” said Michel, “is 4.5 minutes from lift-off to touchdown.”

Last Friday morning, Flight 5313 from Los Angeles revved up right on schedule at 11:13 a.m.

Compact Compartment

The twin-engine Beechcraft C-99, which felt like a vibrating, airborne toothpaste tube, is so small that the four passengers were seated in the same compartment as the pilot and first officer.

There was no flight attendant, no food, no beverages and no bathroom aboard. “We tell them the movie today is the 405 Freeway,” joked pilot John Villedrouin.

After an eight-minute wait to leave the ground, the plane headed west toward the Pacific, climbing to 5,000 feet and hugging the South Bay coastline before veering east past the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Seal Beach and swinging back toward Long Beach. Within 17 minutes--about the time it took for passenger Sue Sucher to consume a couple of pages of a paperback--the plane was back on terra firma.

Sucher, headed to Long Beach from Palo Alto for a youth soccer conference, thought the flight was fascinating. But she added that the haze of smog that hid most of the Los Angeles Basin was mortifying.

“I have a daughter in college in Claremont,” she said, “and it’s very frightening.”

After a 20-minute layover, the return flight was airborne only 8 1/2 minutes--two minutes less than the time it took to taxi in to the terminal once the plane had landed.

The flight--north toward Inglewood and then west to LAX--was also choppier.

“It’s a bumpy road,” said sweating, Chicago-bound Eddie Acuna of Cerritos.

‘Going to Take a Car’

Acuna and his wife, Ophelia, had taken the Long Beach flight to avoid having their 18-year-old son drive them to LAX. Next time, Acuna said, “I’m going to take a car or a cab.”

In May, 224 passengers flew between the two communities on a single scheduled late-morning flight in each direction, according to American Airlines spokesman Ed Stewart. Those numbers were strong enough, Stewart said, that a second, mid-afternoon flight was added last month.

“Believe it or not, there are people who would fly next door if the service were offered,” Stewart said. “We are starved for planes. If it wasn’t used, I guarantee it would be canceled in 10 seconds.”

Added the Dallas-based spokesman: “I’ve never been to Los Angeles for an extended period but I’ve heard the freeways are as bad as putting a bullet through your head.”

Besides their function as connector flights, the Los Angeles-Long Beach flights serve several other purposes.

Free-trip junkies seeking to pick up quick miles for their frequent-flier plans occasionally hop on, since the minimum award American offers for any of its flights is 500 miles.

Frequently Half Empty

American employees also hitch rides, usually for business purposes, on the frequently half-empty planes.

“It’s kind of pretty to fly at 2,000 feet,” noted American Eagle passenger service representative Alex Syracopoulos.

Richard M. Valade, a merchandising manager for General Foods in New York, recently took the noon hop from Long Beach to Los Angeles to take advantage of a cost-cutting scheduling quirk.

Valade would have had to pay $934 for an unrestricted transcontinental round trip between New York and Los Angeles because he made last-minute reservations. But American was offering a special $318 unrestricted fare from the East Coast to Long Beach.

“It was much cheaper to fly from New York to Long Beach than from New York to Los Angeles,” Valade said.