Busy Blue Yonder : John Wayne Official Has Lead Role in Reconfiguring Airspace

At 17, Christine Edwards learned to fly to ease her mother’s fears about who would land the family’s small Cessna should Edwards’ father suffer a heart attack in mid-flight.

It was 1970 and Edwards was a senior at Anaheim’s Loara High School.

Now Edwards, 39, is chief of operations at John Wayne Airport, where she first took wing 22 years ago. She oversees a wide range of activities from parking to baggage handling to security.

But her greatest challenge may be keeping the peace between the small-plane pilots who help make John Wayne one of the nation’s busiest airports, and the commercial airliners that are expanding service in Orange County.

So it is no surprise that Edwards has taken a lead role in a regional organization that’s trying to reconfigure Southern California’s crowded skies. She is co-chairperson of the Southern California Air Space Users’ Group, which hopes to replace the complex system of restricted airspace with something easier for pilots to understand and obey.

The idea, said Edwards, is to open up more space to small planes while improving safety for air travelers and residents under the flight paths.

The organization includes pilots, engineers, air traffic controllers and airline industry representatives. Holding together a group with such diverse and competing interests is no small challenge, and observers agree that Edwards’ disarmingly low-key management style helped get warring factions within the aviation community to sit at the same table.

“These are people who normally throw rocks at each other,” said Al Pregler, safety coordinator for the western region of the Air Line Pilots Assn.

Generally, the small-plane pilots feel they are being slowly pushed out of the area by an overly aggressive and protective commercial fleet, and commercial pilots believe that small-plane owners always fight new safety regulations. Meanwhile, the air traffic controllers favor stricter rules and regulations, the flight instructors want pilots to be better-trained, and airport managers want their facilities to serve as many people as possible without losing money.

Although it is far from completing its work, the airspace users’ group has turned an initially hostile Federal Aviation Administration into an ally, with prospects for federal funding and use of the FAA’s computer systems for required testing and modeling. Until recently, the FAA preferred to design and propose its own changes rather than allow the public to initiate the process.

The group has had some impact. At its urging, the FAA last month withdrew plans for a new air safety zone around Long Beach Municipal Airport until adjacent airspaces are also redrawn to avoid potential conflicts. Also, the FAA has asked the group to review airspace around San Diego.

“Nobody’s ever taken a regional approach to managing airspace in Southern California,” Edwards said. “Each piece of the puzzle has been put in place one at a time, whether the whole system makes sense or not.”

With 27 airports dotting the Southern California landscape, it’s no wonder that regulating the airspace to ensure safety is a formidable task.

Southland skies are divided into a complex system of overlapping zones that determine how and where pilots can fly. These zones often resemble upside-down wedding cakes, with more freedom at the top layer, above 12,500 feet, and less freedom in the bottom layers, between 2,500 and 6,500 feet. Some zones require permission from an air traffic controller to gain entry, others merely require brief contact with a controller or none at all. Small planes generally use the space below 10,000 feet and jetliners usually stay above that level, except during takeoffs and landing approaches.

Small plane pilots in particular find the system burdensome. They like to fly under visual flight rules, or VFR, which amounts to “see and be seen” at your own risk. So they try to find routes around the regulated airspace, sometimes flying 30 miles out of their way.

But as airspace becomes more regulated to improve safety, the small-plane pilots who try to avoid the regulated zones find themselves herded into fewer remaining VFR corridors. Paradoxically, this increases the chance of a midair collision between small planes in those corridors, according to Edwards and other aviation experts, because more small planes are “herded” into the same space.

Edwards said the users’ group was formed in the aftermath of the 1986 Cerritos air crash and a midair collision soon thereafter between two small planes. In the Cerritos crash, a small plane struck an Aeromexico jet, killing 67 people aboard the two planes and 15 on the ground.

After the Cerritos crash, the FAA closed a VFR path directly over LAX that had been used by small planes heading up and down the coast. Small-plane pilots were angered by the move, in part because the FAA’s action seemed to bear no relationship to the location or circumstances in the Cerritos crash.

Responding to pressure from small-plane pilots, the FAA eventually relented and reopened the VFR corridor over LAX. But pilots, air traffic controllers and the FAA remained convinced that something still had to be done.

Air traffic in Southern California has increased steadily over the years. There are more than 15,000 aircraft based at airports from Santa Barbara to San Diego, according to the FAA. John Wayne Airport is home base to 915 small planes, and the airport averages 94 commercial airline departures daily.

Between 1986 and 1988, Southern California became the near-midair-collision capital of the United States. In that period, Orange County had 20 reported near midair collisions, ranking in the state behind Los Angeles with 57 incidents and San Francisco with 29.

Since then reports of near midair collisions has declined. Only one such incident was reported for Orange County in 1991.

Orange County had its first incident of 1992 on Jan. 9. The FAA said an air traffic controller in the John Wayne tower mistook one aircraft for another and sent a twin-engine commuter plane into the path of a descending Alaska Airlines jet as both headed for the same runway. The two aircraft missed each other by only 220 feet.

The incident would not have been prevented by changes now being discussed by the airspace user’s group because both planes were already about to touch down at the airport.

Although a year away from being able to present a detailed plan to the FAA, the group’s basic concept involves opening some restricted airspaces to small planes while making the narrow inbound and outbound corridors used by commercial aircraft off limits below a specific altitude, such as 5,000 feet.

Above that altitude, Edwards said, all aircraft would have to be in contact with an air traffic controller.

This plan would enable small-plane pilots to fly more direct routes to more destinations without having to deal with air traffic controllers.

The technical requirements are still being studied, and there’s still wide debate about whether the restricted altitude should be 5,000 feet, 10,000 feet, or even higher.

“We hope to actually release airspace back to general aviation,” said Jim Holtsclaw, an air traffic manager for American Airlines, who is co-chairperson of the panel with Edwards. “And we can demonstrate that this will actually increase the safety factor for air carrier passengers.”

In Edwards’ sparsely decorated office at John Wayne Airport hangs a framed, non-attributed quotation that helps to keep her going: “Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”