Busy Burbank Airport to Gain More Flights, Congestion

USAir announced Thursday that it will soon add seven flights at Burbank Airport, increasing the crush of passengers that has swamped parking lots and jammed the airport’s terminal since airlines began a fare war last month.

The flights, added to 16 that began in April, will sharply increase noise in nearby neighborhoods to “terrible levels,” a homeowner group leader complained.

“When the airlines fight a fare war,” said Tom Paterson, president of Valley Village Homeowners Assn. in North Hollywood, “it’s the people on the ground who suffer.”

When USAir’s new flights to the San Francisco Bay Area begin July 1, there will be 80 flights a day, a 31% increase from 61 a day in June, 1989, said an airport spokesman.

Passenger volume appears to be up even more dramatically since Southwest Airlines triggered the fare war April 16. On that day, Southwest inaugurated service from Burbank with 16 daily flights and a top one-way fare of $59 to Oakland.

Victor J. Gill, airport public relations director, said incomplete passenger records for April indicate that the public responded dramatically to a decision by competing airlines to lower their fares to match Southwest’s price, which was less than one-third the standard fare to Northern California.

Gill said that in the last two weeks of April, average daily passenger traffic was running about 9,700, nearly 40% higher than in April, 1989.

Parking lots also are feeling the crunch, he said.

By late afternoon Thursday, only 150 of the airport’s 2,700 spaces were available, he said, adding: “Once these go, we may be filled up until next week.”

The airport lost 300 of its 3,000 spaces recently to accommodate construction of a Federal Aviation Administration control tower. Those spaces will be available again when the tower is completed in December, Gill said.

The lack of spaces Thursday occurred despite the airport’s leasing 325 spaces from Lockheed Corp. the day before.

Those spots were hastily restriped to accommodate airline and airport employees who had been parking in the airport’s long-term lots, Gill said.

Paterson said his group and other homeowner organizations upset about increased airport noise plan to meet soon with Los Angeles City Council members to press for a lawsuit to force some of the flights to take off to the east, over the cities of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena, which own the airport.

“It’s noisy down here and getting worse,” he said.