PERSPECTIVE ON LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT : Nobody Manufactures Airspace : Why take on 60% more passengers when the flying already is dangerous, ground traffic intolerable?

Los Angeles International Airport is among the five most “problematic or dangerous” airports in the nation, according to the 200 pilots who answered a questionnaire in Professional Pilot magazine this spring. Why? Some pilots cited the airport’s design, but crowded airspace was the primary problem. There were 665,000 takeoffs and landings at LAX, the nation’s third-busiest airport, last year.

Why, then, are key LAX administrators running around town telling business groups that our airport can easily absorb 60% more passengers a year? Do they have some magic wand that will expand airspace in the same way that they plan to expand terminals and parking lots?

Basic air traffic at Los Angeles and other airports is measured in millions of annual passengers, a measurement that does not even begin to take air-cargo traffic into account. LAX currently handles about 45 million passengers a year. A decade-old interim plan for the airport called for limiting traffic to 40 million passengers, but failed to provide workable mechanisms for enforcing that limit. Because federal regulations make it almost impossible for local governments to control air traffic levels at airports handling interstate commerce and because the City Charter leaves the airport largely independent of City Council control, there hasn’t been much that anyone could do about enforcing the planned limits at LAX. Now we see plans for 70 million or more annual passengers.

Communities surrounding the airport are understandably outraged at the notion of more growth. LAX has brought increasing numbers of noisy jet planes and enormous amounts of ground traffic congestion to the airport vicinity, inflicting significant air pollution on the region in the process.

It has been estimated that up to half of the street congestion south of the Santa Monica Freeway can be at least partly attributed to LAX, including travelers, workers and deliveries.

Traffic problems are exacerbated by the airport’s location, which impedes a strategic north-south coastal transportation corridor. Westchester-area businesspeople complain that customers now stay away from their stores and offices because it’s no longer convenient to go anywhere near LAX unless LAX is your destination.

It is only recently, literally in the past few months, that the airport’s administration has begun to show some sensitivity to nearby residents. One proposal to reduce noise by phasing out the operation of older jet aircraft at LAX is so aggressive that a stodgy Federal Aviation Administration is threatening to withhold much-needed soundproofing money in retaliation. LAX is also backing away from earlier proposals to eliminate a community park and destroy large parts of the environmentally sensitive El Segundo Dunes.

With my constituents, I appreciate these positive steps. But in the face of increasing air safety and air-pollution problems, increasingly intolerable traffic conditions on the ground and a hostile surrounding community, the airport’s desire to accommodate 60% more passengers doesn’t make any sense. So why does anyone want this expansion?

To hear airport management officials talk about it, it’s purely a matter of making LAX the key hub for economic growth on the California edge of the Pacific Rim. To hear Bush Administration officials talk about it, it’s a matter of providing American business more unfettered opportunities to compete.

Between all this talk and the deafening jet-engine noise, the sensible safety concerns of the professional pilots and the fundamental air-quality, noise and traffic concerns of the airport’s neighbors are being drowned out. At the same time, sensible plans to expand the airport’s Palmdale facility and disperse both the impact and benefits of air commerce continue to stagnate.

City Hall’s response to this situation has been to propose a new Airport Master Plan. Unfortunately, the planning effort has been hampered by lack of staff and funding and the insistence by airport officials that the master plan accept their growth goals before examining the impact of that potential growth and looking at reasonable alternatives.

Even the phasing in of super-jumbo 400-passenger planes, a “technological fix” that air transport officials are depending on to ease the crunch in coming years, won’t work any miracles. How can we turn to fewer flights using jumbo jets when what the airlines are selling is the convenience of frequent flights to preferred destinations? Even if the marketplace encouraged the idea of more passengers on fewer planes, there is still the problem of getting those passengers to and from the airport, which LAX proposes to solve by building another 8,000 parking spaces in the next few years. Imagine the effect of this on traffic.

LAX is not the only American airport with safety problems, but its fundamental problem is are too many planes trying to fly in the same little slice of airspace. When alternatives like Palmdale exist, there’s no excuse for proposing to squeeze more into that airspace.