Fond Memories of an Outdated Airport : More Jets, More Noise, More Strife

One afternoon this week, Nola Collins’ young daughter rushed up to her and announced: “Earthquake!” But Collins, a 13-year resident of Tustin’s “old town” neighborhood, was all-too familiar with this joke by now. Unlike temblors, the noise and vibrations rattle Collins’ 100-year-old house several times each hour.

“Stick your head out of my window. Look straight up and you can see the bellies of the jetliners flying over my house,” Collins said to a visitor in explaining the source of the trouble.

“It gets so bad you have to stop talking. People around here aren’t happy about the airport increasing the number of flights.”

After the new Thomas F. Riley Terminal opens Sunday, the number of arrivals and departures will gradually increase by about 40%. More flights obviously mean more noise, and if there is one issue that has dominated the history of John Wayne Airport, it’s noise.

Airport neighbors, including the city of Newport Beach, waged legal battles for years in unsuccessful attempts to block airport expansion. But the county reached a negotiated settlement with these litigants in 1985 by agreeing to limit airport capacity to 8.4 million passengers annually.

The number of departures by noisier jets is still restricted but will increase from 55 a day to 73 on Oct. 1 under the 1985 agreement. What’s more, use of a new generation of quieter jets is limited only by the airport’s annual passenger count, so the total number of commercial airline arrivals and departures combined is expected to climb from about 190 a day now to more than 280 within a few years.

As a result, airport officials are bracing for more complaints from homeowners such as Collins.

“I expect more complaints, especially from people in Tustin,” airport manager George A. Rebella said recently. “Not because of the noise volumes, but because of the frequency of overflights.”

Until now, Santa Ana Heights, the neighborhood just south of the airport and directly under the departure route, the Eastbluff area along Upper Newport Bay and the Balboa-Corona del Mar area have been the hotbed of airport opposition. Engine thrust is much stronger during takeoffs than landings, producing average quarterly noise-level readings in Santa Ana Heights that are 10 decibels above the averages recorded in Tustin.

Still, Tustin and the unincorporated area just north of the city are expected to be the next big battlegrounds over airport noise, Rebella said, because aircraft engineers have not made as many advances in quieting jets during landings as they have for takeoffs. (The newer jet engines are up to 50% quieter on takeoffs than the engines of just a few years ago. But the quietest jetliners, such as the BAE-146, are small, so it takes more flights to carry the same passenger load as a bigger, noisier aircraft).

Responding to citizen complaints, the Tustin City Council last year hired a technical consultant to take noise readings throughout the area and monitor airport noise-abatement activities.

“We have monitored very carefully the noise of approaching aircraft coming over Tustin,” Mayor Richard B. Edgar said. “We got a lot of measurements. But we found no evidence of a failure to abide by state noise standards. What we did find was that more aircraft were flying over us than there should have been.”

For several months last year, a lengthy project to replace airport navigational equipment forced more pilots to use the airport’s instrument-landing approach over Tustin, instead of over the Costa Mesa Freeway.

The equipment problems have been solved, airport officials said, but still, complaints abound.

“There’s an ongoing unhappiness,” Edgar said. “And I’m absolutely certain that complaints will increase because of the number of flights. But as I try to tell everyone, we don’t have a legal basis for stopping them.”

The airport has a sophisticated noise-monitoring system based in part on measurements from sound detectors located under and near the approach and departure flight paths.

Airport officials recently postponed for 45 days a new daily flight that TWA was to inaugurate on Oct. 1 because the air carrier’s McDonell Douglas MD-80s had violated permissible quarterly noise averages.

Meanwhile, there’s also a noise-abatement hot line that records complaints from callers.

Complaints generally rise during the summer months because there are more flights, more people spend time outdoors and more windows are left open longer. But the number of complaints can swing wildly.

For example, the airport received a total of 413 complaints during the first quarter of 1990--a 20% decrease from the previous quarter and a 35% drop from the first three months of 1989. But jetliner traffic had remained virtually unchanged during that first quarter of 1990.

During the second quarter, the number of noise complaints soared to 703--a 70.2% increase from the previous three-month period. This time, jetliner traffic increased only 4%.

Airport officials attributed the rise in complaints to seasonal behavior, fears sparked by media coverage of the new passenger terminal and the resulting increase in air traffic, and a newsletter in the Balboa-Corona del Mar area that urged residents to complain more often.

Under new procedures adopted recently, the airlines are notified individually about complaints involving specific flights. Before, they were merely given computer printouts of raw noise data.

Also, the county has rezoned much of the Santa Ana Heights area as industrial to avoid future homeowner problems. And the individual homeowner was given until March, 1987, to either let the county soundproof the home or sell it to the county, which would then insulate the house and resell it.

But fewer than 50 homeowners participated in the purchase program, with the county completing purchase of about 20. Less than a dozen of those have been resold because of disputes over appraisals and bureaucratic red tape.

“I resisted the soundproofing program,” said Malcolm F. Thompson, who has lived in Santa Ana Heights since 1962, when there were only two commercial airline departures a day. Thompson said he didn’t participate because the county required that the homeowner give up the right to future claims against the county over use of the airspace.

Thompson acknowledged that, collectively, the jetliners flying out of John Wayne are quieter now than in previous years. But he added: “It’s not just the noise . . . the jets are very dirty. There’s a film of soot on my patio by the end of the day. As the jets pull up steeply, I’m right in their exhaust.”

Bob Olds, an Eastbluff resident who serves on Newport Beach’s Aviation Committee and the county’s Noise Abatement Forum, said this week that while the jets today are quieter, complaints persist because pilots sometimes veer from the correct departure path. Turning too soon or too late by only a few seconds, he explained, determines whether the jetliners fly over homes or over the upper bay, which is the intended route.

“There are homes only 500 feet from the flight path,” Olds said. “If the pilots turn too soon or too late, they really ‘boom’ the houses.”