Restrictions on Airport Noise Upheld : Transportation: U.S. appeals court rules that Long Beach can place limits on the roar of aircraft. Ruling called mostly symbolic for Orange County.

In a ruling that could have national impact on the issue of regulating airport noise, a federal appeals court Wednesday upheld the right of the city of Long Beach to limit the roar of jets and the buzz of small planes that fly out of the Long Beach Municipal Airport.

The ruling by the U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals was hailed as a major victory for the city, which has spent eight years fighting to control aircraft noise, and residents, who maintain that life near the airport is “annoying as hell.”

“This decision clearly upholds the authority of an airport to regulate aircraft noise--what kinds of planes, the cumulative noise level and, if necessary, the number of flights,” said Lee L. Blackman, special counsel to the city of Long Beach.

But a lawyer representing 10 airlines who sued the city in 1983 called the opinion “dangerous,” warning it could cripple the network of flights that move millions of passengers and tons of freight around the nation annually.

“If every airport wants to restrict flights as Long Beach has attempted, there could be fewer and fewer flights across the country,” Los Angeles attorney John J. Lyons said. “This could potentially allow airports nationwide to shut down the national air transportation system.”

The ruling’s significance for residents near recently expanded John Wayne Airport in Orange County is mostly symbolic, airport officials said.

That’s partly because John Wayne’s noise regulations, unlike Long Beach’s, are tied directly to the airport terminal’s passenger-handling capacity and a court-approved settlement of a 1985 lawsuit filed by Newport Beach and homeowners’ groups. Instead of limiting the number of daily departures, as had occurred before the court settlement, the county now restricts the number of passengers going through the terminal to 8.4 million annually.

A group of pilots and aircraft manufacturers want to modify John Wayne Airport’s takeoff procedure, which involves a steep climb out and then a sharp power reduction for some jets. That procedure was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration and is not enforced by the airport, although John Wayne officials don’t want to lose the noise benefits involved. The FAA is reviewing the controversy.

Both airports’ noise rules were grandfathered by Congress and thus don’t come under the FAA’s new national airport noise policy, which had threatened John Wayne’s ban on noisier, older-generation jets such as the Boeing 727.

The new policy allows a gradual phase-out of such jets but prohibits anything tougher.

John Wayne Airport spokeswoman Courtney Wiercioch said a problem with Thursday’s court decision is that the Long Beach noise policy has a clause that if any section of the policy is nullified, the entire policy is negated. It’s not clear, Wiercioch said, if the fixes suggested by the court Thursday will end Long Beach Airport’s grandfathered status.

“Any airport proprietor would be pleased when a court upholds its ability to regulate its own facility,” Wiercioch said. “We’ve always advocated that the county should be allowed to regulate John Wayne Airport in the manner best suited for the residents of Orange County.”

Long Beach first attempted to control noise at its 68-year-old airport in 1981, ultimately limiting the number of daily flights to 32 and the cumulative noise level to 65 decibels--the rough equivalent of an office with a clacking typewriter and several ringing telephones.

The airlines argued that the ordinance set “arbitrary and capricious” flight limits and interfered with interstate commerce.

U.S. District Judge Laughlin E. Waters in Los Angeles declared the ordinance illegal and pushed the flight limit to 40. The city appealed.

The appellate ruling is complicated because it technically upholds Waters’ finding that the ordinance is unconstitutional. But it does so on extremely narrow grounds--that the city failed to give the airlines the right to a hearing and that small commuter planes were unfairly excluded from flying--points city officials say can be easily remedied by rewriting the ordinance.

More significantly, the appeals court panel upheld the city’s right to control its airport’s noise and said the courts have no place questioning the reason behind whatever limits a city or an airport set.

City officials were preparing to evaluate their next move, and it was unclear whether they would attempt to use the ruling to further roll back flights.

The airport currently exceeds the ordinance’s 65-decibel noise limit only slightly. And, because of recent airline mergers, bankruptcies and financial trouble in the airline industry, the number of daily flights is lower than the 32 the ordinance would allow, officials said.

“I would like to see less flights, but we will have to talk to our attorneys to find out what steps to take,” said City Councilman Jeff Kellogg, whose district sits directly under the airport’s main runway.

Residents who live in the neighborhoods around the airport--and who have complained for years about the noise--welcomed the ruling as a way to maintain peace of mind.

“The windows rattle. If you’re watching TV or talking on the phone you have to stop. It’s annoying as hell,” said Mike Donelon, who lives just blocks from a main runway. some kind of control, I think it ‘

Times staff writer Jeffrey A. Perlman contributed to this story.