COVER STORY : Airing Their Differences : It’s Noise. It’s Freedom. It’s Two Views Life Around the Runway in Santa Monica

Defenders of Santa Monica Airport ride out neighborhood complaints as calmly as they might a patch of bumpy air.

Ask about last year’s fatal crash of a small plane into a nearby apartment house, and you risk a lecture on the relative danger of crossing the street.

Mention complaints about noise and jet exhaust, and prepare for a rousing defense of private aviation as America’s last bastion of individualism.

When all else fails, airport backers hit you with the hard facts: The airport existed long before the teeming neighborhoods that surround it--and it’s not going anywhere soon.

“Get over it,” advises a waitress at the Spitfire Grill, a popular fliers’ hangout. “If you’re going to live in L.A., get used to noise and smog.”

Things may not be that simple.

Ten years after the signing of an agreement that guarantees the Cessnas and Lear jets will swoop overhead until 2015, aviators and neighbors are still struggling to live with one another.

Perennially one of the busiest single-runway airports in the nation, it has evolved into a gathering place for bohemians, inventors, celebrities and others who share a love of flying.

For residents who share a love of peace and quiet, however, it remains a source of exasperation--a never-ending aerial parade of ear-splitting machines over some of the priciest real estate in California.

Just west of the airfield, Freida Marlin, a resident of the Lincoln Place Apartments in Venice, shudders at the sound of low-flying aircraft, many of which she said fail to follow prescribed departure routes intended to cut noise.

“They’ve taken away our skies,” she said.

East of the airport, Virginia Ernst shows a visitor a home video of private jets billowing black exhaust into her West Los Angeles neighborhood along Sardis Avenue. The rustic airfield of yore is but a quaint memory against the backdrop of ever-escalating jet traffic. “We’re eating kerosene,” she said.

Meanwhile, the city-owned airport, which in 1981 dodged an attempt by the City Council to close it, maintains an almost bucolic air, belying its ranking as the busiest single-runway airport in the nation, according to a 1992 Federal Aviation Administration list, the most recent available.

People who work and play there describe the airport as a hive of creative energy where free spirits flourish.

“Everybody’s treated equally,” said Barry Schiff, chairman of the Santa Monica Airport Assn., a group of pilots and other airport users. “All you need is an interest in flying and you’re accepted. . . . It’s a lovely isolation.”

Many go as far as to portray the 215-acre airfield--an eclectic clot that includes small businesses, manufacturers, inventors, artists, writers and restaurants--as a community in its own right.

Galvanized by a common technology, a sense of adventure and the hard-fought political battles of years past, the airport retains the laid-back, intimate feel of its origins as a rural airstrip. People know each other by name--and by aircraft. At the Spitfire Grill, the talk flows as freely as the coffee.

“It’s kind of a beautiful life,” said artist Ted Kerzie, whose custom-painted plane is parked about a hundred feet from his studio, which is in a hangar.

Despite its easygoing air, the place bustles.

Each year the airport is the site of more than 200,000 takeoffs and landings. Traffic has fallen off recently due to construction at the airport and the recession, but officials expect it to expand about 5% a year for the foreseeable future.

Those numbers only hint at the dizzying array of airport-related activities.

In preparation for major tours, big-name rock stars--including Jimmy Buffet, Janet Jackson and Rod Stewart--have set up their stages and rehearsed in cavernous Barker Hangar, a 40,000-square-foot airplane storage shed that doubles as a social hub and mini art colony on the airport’s south side.

A conservation-minded attorney stores bush planes there until they can be transported to Africa to track poachers.

Each year thousands of schoolchildren and others stream through the Museum of Flying, which includes one of the nation’s largest collections of World War II-era fighters, as well as other aircraft.

A few weeks ago the builder of an experimental jet, the BD-10, spent a Saturday taking prospective buyers for rides at $1,000 a pop.

On almost any day, one can see doctors, lawyers and other well-heeled hobbyists tinkering with their home-built Long-EZs, experimental two-seaters shaped like the Klingon warships of “Star Trek” fame.

A few hundred feet away, private jets whisk corporate and Hollywood elites into the blue beyond.

About 500 aircraft are based at the airport, including those of such celebrities as Bill Cosby, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kirk Douglas and Kurt Russell. Talk show host Jay Leno and comedian Jerry Seinfeld stow car collections in hangars there.

“This is a whole wild group of people at the airport,” said Judi Barker, owner of Barker Hangar.

About 40 professional artists have studio space at the airport.

“There’s a fearlessness here,” said artist Sierra Pecheur, basking in the sunlit spaciousness of her airport studio. “People don’t seem to be afraid that you’re going to take their air. There’s enough for everyone.”

Such ethereal musings contrast with the controversies that shadow the airport. Opened in 1919 as a dirt strip in a barley field, Clover Field, as it was known then, gradually developed into a major aviation center. In its heyday in the mid-1940s it was home to Douglas Aircraft, which turned out scores of bombers and transport carriers during World War II and, from Santa Monica, orchestrated the world’s first round-the-world flight.

Employing 30,000 workers, Douglas fueled a housing boom around the airport. But in 1962, after the city refused to let the company expand onto residential property, Douglas departed.

Over time a new crop of neighbors harboring no loyalty to the airport moved in. By the 1970s, many of them, unhappy with the noise, began urging its closure. The Santa Monica City Council in 1981 voted to do just that. But the U.S. Justice Department, contending that federal contracts obligated the city to keep the airport open, threatened to sue.

Years of negotiations led to an agreement in 1984 in which the city agreed to keep the airport open until 2015, partly in exchange for more control over airport policies, including those aimed at noise reduction.

Airport backers widely contend the agreement launched a new era of cooperation in which pilots, the FAA and airport staff have worked hand-in-hand to address neighborhood complaints.

Airport Director Jeff Mathieu estimates that 40% of the facility’s $1.8-million operating budget goes toward noise reduction, which involves educating pilots, maintaining the airport’s 24-hour noise monitoring system and responding to community complaints.

Added airport manager Tim Walsh: “Noise has been my specialty. Obviously a lot of my time is spent dealing with the pilots and the community to make this place work.”

Airplane noise can’t exceed 95 decibels. (By comparison, a kitchen garbage disposal, heard from a distance of 10 feet, emits about 85 decibels.)

A “Please Fly Quietly” banner hangs outside the main terminal, and a 15-foot-high blast wall, intended as a noise and debris buffer, is planned for the east end of the runway. Construction could start this summer if Congress approves funding.

But fines are rare and relatively light, reflecting officials’ preference for “extensive outreach and counseling.” So-called “transient pilots” who might not be familiar with local noise-abatement rules typically escape with a warning, as do other first-time offenders. In all, five aircraft were banned outright last year for breaking the noise barrier--a penalty reserved for “willful and repetitive violators.”

Of the 552 reported noise violations in 1993, the airport handed out 15 fines, ranging from $100 to $500. Officials said most of the 552 violations were first-time offenses, or, in some cases, the result of weather or safety factors.

The numbers have fueled skepticism among some neighbors, who contend that airport officials aren’t tough enough and that some pilots have become adroit at evading noise monitoring microphones.

Ernst and her husband, Norm, who have battled the airport since the 1960s, said fumes and noise have become unbearable the past two years, mostly because of what they contend is a dramatic surge in jet traffic. They are angry that the airport has allowed the sale of jet fuel, and hint that a lawsuit to ban jets may be in the wings.

“We used to get one jet a week. Now we get 15 a day,” she said, showing a homemade video of jets revving up before takeoff--a tape she has shown to the FAA, the city Airport Commission and a City Council member.

Airport officials acknowledge that the advent of smaller, quieter corporate and personal jets, combined with the airport’s location near major business centers and movie studios, has caused such traffic to soar.

They say they’ve had some success cutting noise by limiting the time jets spend revving up on the runway.

“They all agree there’s a problem,” Ernst added, “but they can’t agree on what to do.”

Meanwhile, her neighbor, Brookie Westbrook, a former Navy pilot, worries about planes coming in so low they sometimes must gun their engines to clear an embankment and make it onto the runway--an observation dismissed by a top airport official as “highly unlikely.”

“They just skim the trees,” Westbrook said. “They come over the (San Diego) freeway and drop down. If they have an engine failure, that’s it. They’re going to wipe out two blocks of houses.”

Such comments make veteran fliers lunge for their airsickness bags.

“The principle that the sky is falling because there’s an airport in the community and it’s going to hurt someone is totally unsubstantiated by fact,” said Donald Brandsen, a longtime airport activist and pilot.

Statistics support that. Santa Monica Airport averages one crash per 200,000 takeoffs and landings--about one per year--compared to a general aviation accident rate of five per 100,000, according to airport manager Walsh.

Furthermore, no one on the ground has ever been killed as the result of a crash involving the airport.

But luck has been a factor.

In November, a pilot and his passenger were killed when their small plane slammed into a Santa Monica apartment building after takeoff.

In 1992, a pilot was killed when his plane hit a utility pole while trying to return to the airport. The plane exploded in a residential area near Dewey Street and Walgrove Avenue in Venice.

In 1989, a home-built Wheeler Express plane crashed into two houses in West Los Angeles after the pilot reported engine problems. No one was seriously injured.

While these and other incidents provide chilling, if infrequent reminders of the hazards posed by the airport, aviators as a class exhibit little patience for the nervous Nellies on the ground.

With irritation creeping into his voice, entrepreneur Dave Ronneberg, designer of a Long EZ spinoff, the Berkut, said the chance of being killed by lightning far exceeds the chance of being killed by a falling airplane.

Of his experimental Berkut, he said, “It’s the safest machine I’ve ever owned.”

And as for his neighbors’ anxieties? “Ignorance is a terrible thing.”

Pilots and others advocates are thin-skinned about perceptions of the airport as a playground for the rich. They contend that the airport serves as a hub of commerce for an otherwise struggling region, helps relieve overburdened Los Angeles International Airport and employs about 600 people in airport-related businesses.

Yet even Mathieu, the airport director, said, “A small number of people have significant, valid concerns.”

And there is general agreement that a few free-spirited fliers disregard the people below.

“You have some stubborn people who won’t listen,” Barker said.

The scofflaws have at least until 2015 to learn the rules. After that, the future of the airport, located on some of the more desirable land on the Westside, clouds up.

In 1990, pilots, homeowners and others successfully fought a proposed one-million-square-foot office park there. Will those unlikely allies need to band together again 20 years from now?

Aircraft designer Ronneberg said the land could produce more revenue if it were used for something other than an airport.

“‘But at what cost?” he asked. “There’d be something lost forever.”