Jets, Quest for More Profit Reshape Van Nuys Airport
On the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941, hours after Japanese bombers struck Pearl Harbor, U.S. Army officers drove up to Van Nuys Airport and commandeered the dirt-strip airfield for the war effort.
In less than a month, the sleepy country airport was transformed into a bustling military complex.
The changes taking place these days at the central San Fernando Valley airfield are occurring more slowly than those rushed through 49 years ago by the Air Corps.
Many in the aviation community think that over time, they will be as dramatic.
Ever since the Air Force moved out after the war, Van Nuys Airport has served as a training ground and playground for tens of thousands of private pilots. As a result, the Los Angeles City-owned facility has long been the world’s busiest general aviation field and currently is the seventh-busiest airport in the nation, although it has no scheduled commercial air service.
Current trends suggest that a decade from now the airport will be as much an office complex as an aviation facility. Although it might still lead the nation in takeoffs and landings 10 years from now, weekend pleasure fliers with their Cessnas and Pipers will have been largely replaced by private jets.
Both trends began about a decade ago and homeowners, pleasure pilots and airport officials disagree over whether airport managers should allow the trends to continue or seek to reverse them.
In 1979, there were 1,333 piston-engine planes at Van Nuys Airport; today there are only 711.
During the same 11 years, the number of jets based at the airport grew from 18 to 93.
The jets seem to be winning out for scarce space at the airport through a Darwinian process in which only the economically fittest survive.
The airport does not rent space directly to airplane owners. Instead, it rents land to aircraft-related businesses and leaves it largely up to them whether they will cater to jets or piston craft.
Business operators say that renting and servicing jets, and leasing space for jets, which are favored by corporate executives and high rollers who don’t blink at spending thousands of dollars an hour to get somewhere in a hurry and are willing to pay higher rates, is far more profitable than doing business with owners of piston craft.
The list of regular jet users at Van Nuys Airport includes many of Southern California’s biggest employers--Litton Industries, Hughes Aircraft, General Motors, Great Western Savings. Also regularly appearing on the airport’s flight log are many of the Southland’s movers and shakers: sports and publishing mogul Jack Kent Cooke, Chatsworth computer chip maker Tandon Jawahar and former President Ronald Reagan.
Airport officials agree that pitting jets against pistons sometimes seems to be an unfair contest, particularly since pleasure fliers who use piston engines have already been buffeted during the 1980s by sharply higher insurance and maintenance costs.
But the officials nonetheless characterize the advances made by jets as being as natural as the triumph of weeds over flowers in an untended garden.
“As a government agency, we cannot give anything away,” said airport Manager Charles Zeman. “We have to get fair market value for the land we rent out to fixed-base operators.”
Under contracts with tenants, the airport raises its rent every five years.
