Orange County’s Airport Takes Off : Dedication: Officials say rebuilt facility shows how far county has come. New terminal opens next Sunday.

Sixty-seven years after Eddie Martin, the late aviation pioneer, first offered $5 joy rides from a vacant Irvine Ranch lot, Orange County on Saturday officially dedicated its virtually rebuilt, $310-million John Wayne Airport .

Public use of the cramped 23-year-old Eddie Martin Terminal will cease late next Saturday, to be replaced Sunday morning by a cavernous $62-million domed passenger hall 12 times as big. It will be renamed the Thomas F. Riley Terminal, named after the county supervisor most responsible for the face lift.

The old open-air parking lot, enclosed in a chain-link fence, has given way to twin multilevel garages flanking the new terminal. A third garage in front of the terminal stretches half a mile--the longest parking garage in North America, project managers say.

The rickety portable stairs that passengers climbed to their planes have been scrapped in favor of $3 million worth of modern “jetways,” covered loading bridges that will link gates directly to aircraft.

And the former cuisine offered at a single tiny snack shop and restaurant has been swapped for McDonald’s french fries, Pizza Hut pan pizzas, chocolate truffles, croissants and a bevy of other foodstuffs at new restaurants. Down to the most mundane of details--the automated urinals in the men’s room, for instance, which flush themselves when the user walks away--the biggest public works project in county history smacks of modernization.

Even the Duke, the airport namesake himself, could not escape the county’s headlong rush into the 21st Century. The John Wayne statue, once a uniform copper tint, has been colorized a la Ted Turner films--with rusty red shirt, black bandanna, dark khaki pants and dark gray cowboy hat--for its move indoors to the new terminal.

The new facility is “a miracle of engineering, electronics and man’s ingenuity,” former airline executive Robert W. Clifford boasted at Saturday’s dedication ceremony, attended by at least 10,000 people and replete with bands, balloons, games and prizes.

But once the freshness wears off, what’s left? More daily flights and a wider selection of destinations? Almost certainly. Lower fares? Probably not. More noise? Residents fear so.

Seen by some travel agents as a “boutique” airport because of its high use for business travel, John Wayne has long had consistently higher fares than other Southland airports. Even though the new terminal will see a near doubling of the annual limit on fliers to 8.4 million and a marked increase in daily flights to about 160, it will not prompt any real closure of that price gap, according to airline officials.

What it will mean, instead, industry officials predict, is a new-found respect for Orange County in the eyes of travelers whose first glance of the area until now had been an eyesore.

As a symbol of the county’s swift progress, the new airport “gives us a whole different dimension,” Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder said. “L.A. will have to sit up and take notice. . . . What the Performing Arts Center did for Orange County in that realm, this will do for commerce.”

If the new terminal’s grand opening is a milestone in the development of a county once thought of as a quiet refuge from Los Angeles, some county leaders say it is also a test of how far local residents are willing to let that development go.

The new facility marks what Ken Delino, a Newport Beach city official active in airport debates over the years, called “the culmination of the great compromise.”

For years, the county was caught in the middle of a tense battle between residents who sought to halt the airport’s growth and airlines that saw a burgeoning market and wanted a bigger piece of it.

Under terms of a 1985 court settlement in which Newport Beach accepted the current expansion in exchange for a limit on airport growth, John Wayne remains one of the most tightly regulated airports in the country, with restrictions on noise, flights, aircraft use and nighttime flying. Even so, central county residents who live in the airport’s shadow are worried about the price of progress.

Take Ed Hall, for instance.

A former small plane flier, he believes the county “owes it to its young people to make the airport usable. That’s a must. . . . It’s a damn shame that a county as wealthy as ours should make people go out in the rain to board an airplane.”

But at the same time, as founder of Concerned Homeowners of Sherwood Estates, a Santa Ana Heights neighborhood immediately to the west of the airport, Hall fears that the new terminal will inevitably mean bigger and noisier planes, as air carriers seek profitable direct routes to Hawaii and the East Coast, expected in a year or two.

Residents aren’t the only people worried.

Despite denials from airport officials, private, non-commercial fliers--who have a thousand aircraft and account for about 80% of John Wayne’s takeoffs and landings--predict that they may be squeezed out of operations as the demand for commercial air carrier space soars.

Airport officials acknowledge that, under the cap on annual fliers imposed by the 1985 case, even the new terminal could soon be overtaxed--if not shortly after its opening, then almost certainly within a few years. It will not end the need for a regional airport to serve Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties, they say.

But the regional airport concept has been stalled by political battles, with no resolution in sight.

Airport officials are happy to get the terminal completed. It was scheduled to open April 1. But according to an Orange County Grand Jury report, design problems and sloppy oversight caused that target to be missed, costing the county $5.6 million in lost revenue.