Pilots Desert New Airport Safety Zone

Orange County’s influential pilots’ association will withdraw its support for a new air-safety zone due to go into effect around John Wayne Airport on Thursday because it is “unsafe,” the group’s lawyer said Monday.

Scott D. Raphael, general counsel for the Orange County Airport Assn., said that he and other officers of the 200-member pilots’ group met Friday with air-traffic control managers and concluded that the new safety zone requires more air-traffic controllers than the Federal Aviation Administration has available to safely monitor aircraft in the airport area.

The group’s opposition, which Raphael predicted will be joined by the national Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., comes after years of controversy about safety in the skies above Orange County and what was to have been a breakthrough in cooperation between private pilots and the FAA after negotiations began on a hopeful note in 1988.

The airspace above county residents ranks seventh in the nation in near midair collisions, and a National Transportation Safety Board report last year sharply criticized the Coast Terminal Radar Control facility (TRACON) for having inadequate staffing and equipment, although FAA officials strongly disputed the findings and displayed a modern-looking control room to the news media last summer.

There are an estimated 12,000 licensed pilots--commercial and general aviation--in Orange County. John Wayne Airport is the nation’s fifth busiest airport in landings and takeoffs, and more than 80% of its operations involve non-commercial, general aviation.

Raphael, a commercial pilot and Newport Beach aviation attorney, said the county pilots’ association is upset with the plans for the new Airport Radar Service Area (ARSA) because it found out that it will be administered as though it were a much tougher system, called a Terminal Control Area, or TCA. TCA rules require a pilot to obtain permission to enter the airspace. Radar identification and maintaining two-way radio contact are also required.

The pilot of a small plane that collided with an Aeromexico jetliner over Cerritos in August, 1986, did not obtain permission to enter the TCA around Los Angeles International Airport.

The ARSA scheduled for implementation Thursday around John Wayne Airport consists of a cylinder of air extending up to five miles from the runways in several directions. ARSA procedures generally require two-way radio communication between a pilot and an air-traffic controller but not permission per se to enter the air space.

Raphael said the use of TCA rules for John Wayne’s ARSA violate federal regulations. He added that the new rules also will mean that air-traffic controllers at Coast TRACON will be too busy most of the time and will place dozens of small planes in congested areas outside the ARSA.

“The danger is that there will be more and more planes bunching up in these other areas, and that’s our safety concern,” he said.

Don Miller, vice president of the Orange County Airport Assn., said Monday that he could not comment on his group’s position yet because of talks going on with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn.

He said he and another Airport Assn. official met Monday with Joe Fowler, the FAA manager at the John Wayne Airport control tower. But he said he could not say anything “substantive” about the talks.

Fowler and Coast TRACON officials could not be reached for comment.

Fowler, however, said on Friday that a simulation of the new air safety zone was carried out last Thursday without a hitch.

And Mike Desrosiers, vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn. chapter at Coast TRACON, defended the new ARSA rules Monday.

“During the simulation on Thursday, there was only one plane that was delayed--for five minutes,” he said. “It’s going to be a lot of hard work and it’s going to take patience on everybody’s part, but I think it’ll be OK.

“We’re going to make it work,” Desrosiers added. “We have near-misses every day, and we’re tired of putting up with it.”