Cover Story : THE Incredible Shrinking Long Beach Airport

About 9 p.m., the terminal building empties of passengers, sparrows gather on the tail of a sleek American Airlines MD-80 parked outside and, like other places of business, Long Beach Airport dozes off for a few hours.

But lately, the airport has been snoozing in more significant ways. Long Beach’s commercial air business is threatening to go into the Big Sleep, with potentially dire consequences for businesses all over the city.

All those shiny, bullet-shaped passenger jets that used to swoop down onto the 10,000-foot main runway are becoming an endangered species in Long Beach.

At a time when the city is reeling from Defense Department cutbacks and the withdrawal of the Navy, American Airlines has announced that, as of June 16, it will no longer fly out of Long Beach Airport. The decision was based on economic factors, an American spokesman said. Last month’s announcement came 10 days after Alaska Airlines officials said they were reducing their number of daily Long Beach flights from six to three.

And those were just the latest bulletins in four years’ worth of bad news for the airport, as one by one--Continental, Delta, TWA and USAir--took their business elsewhere.

“It’s the incredible shrinking airport,” said Kevin McAchren, president of Airserve, an airport-based company that provides ground support for the airlines.

Of course, the airport is still one of the busiest general aviation centers in the nation, with more than 400,000 takeoffs and landings by small private airplanes last year. Only Van Nuys and John Wayne airports are busier.

But it is the passenger jets that stir Long Beach’s economy.

The loss of five daily flights--two from American and three from Alaska--means that, starting next month, Long Beach will have only seven commercial and three cargo flights per day.

According to a USC study, for every commercial flight withdrawn by an airline, the city loses $175,000 a year in direct revenue and $6 million in economic impact, which includes everything from hotel bookings and restaurant meals consumed by passengers to jet fuel and the services of airplane mechanics.

“The ripples go everywhere,” said Dennis Rouse, president of the Long Beach Yellow Cab Co., referring to the economic effects of the shrinking passenger business.

In recent years, city officials and residents have been of two minds about their 1,160-acre airport, imposing rigid regulations to keep the airlines from expanding while fretting that they weren’t getting enough bang for their airport buck.

Rouse has laid off almost 40 cabdrivers since the airport started its decline. “We used to have 50 guys making a living there,” he said. “Now we’re down to about 10.”

But the paring back of daily commercial flights has also meant blissful silence at home, he said. Fewer jet engine run-ups and mad-dash takeoffs. Less dealing with the daily noise from cross-country flights jetting into the city.

“There was one flight--the 6 p.m. United flight from Chicago,” said Rouse, a Belmont Shore resident. “My God, it was loud! You could hear it in the shower.”

The reduction of commercial flights, combined with new rules limiting the hours of operation for small private airplanes flying in and out, has made the airport a quieter place, community leaders say.

Even the private pilots are becoming more noise-conscious, said Mike Donelon, president of the neighborhood association for California Heights, the community located west of the airport. “We’ve been working with the Long Beach Pilots Assn. to get them to fly quieter,” said Donelon, who is in a runoff election for the 7th District City Council seat.

There hasn’t been an airplane accident since October, 1991, when a twin-engine Cessna 414 smashed into a back yard on Argonne Avenue, killing the pilot and a passenger but missing homes by inches. Donelon believes residents have been lulled into a sense of serenity.

But the airport threatens to become a hot issue again, particularly as the City Council extends its search for new sources of revenue. In last month’s mayoral primary, several candidates, including top vote-getter Beverly O’Neill, pressed for a more “business-friendly” approach to the airport.

Like her opponent in the June runoff, City Councilman Ray Grabinski, O’Neill sees the airport as an economic underachiever that could be revived with a little marketing magic.

This could be political dynamite, some elected officials warn.

*

In the early 1980s, efforts by the airlines to drastically increase their number of daily flights out of Long Beach electrified residents of surrounding neighborhoods.

“Long Beach Airport is a bull’s-eye airport,” said Grabinski. “Unlike, say, LAX, there are neighborhoods all the way around it.”

The airport’s neighbors organized pressure groups, initiated legal action and packed the City Council chambers with overflow crowds.

“Those were some of the largest council meetings ever,” said Vice Mayor Jeffrey A. Kellogg, who represents some of the residential areas near the airport.

The big jets were rattling windows and interrupting conversations, the neighbors said. Life near the airport--complete with buzzing helicopters and touch-and-go student airplane flights--was becoming “annoying as hell,” they said.

That round of hostilities led to a strict noise-reduction code, limiting flight hours and the noisier types of jet motors. It also prompted a federal lawsuit, initiated in 1983 by 10 airlines claiming that a city-imposed cap on the number of daily commercial flights was unreasonable.

The legal action, challenged vigorously by the city, has still not been formally resolved. But a federal judge in Los Angeles, with the concurrence of the U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals, has fashioned a temporary compromise, allowing the city to place a “reasonable” limit on the number of daily flights by commercial jets.

That number, said U.S. District Judge Laughlin E. Waters, should be 41, more than double the cap of 18 that the city had imposed.

*

It has been the economy, more than the court action, that has cooled the antagonism, airline officials say. A spokesman for American said that the decision to cancel its two daily flights from Long Beach to Dallas/Fort Worth had less to do with the nature of the airport than with an inability to sell tickets.

“We’ve been operating at 35 to 40% of capacity,” said spokesman Tim Smith. Established airlines, such as American, need planes to be 60% full to break even, he said.

“As far as the community outpouring goes,” Kellogg said, “it has been real quiet, like the airport itself.”

But that could change overnight, say residents of neighborhoods such as Bixby Knolls and Los Altos, which sit at the ends of that 10,000-foot runway.

“I can almost guarantee that, if the numbers (of flights) start to grow significantly, the community will be very active in opposing major expansion,” said Barbara Shoag, a real estate agent who has been active in resisting increases in the number of jet flights.

In fact, an expansion is exactly what airport officials are hoping for. As of last month, four new airlines, hoping to elbow their way into the marketplace with discount flights, had applied to the city for a total of 33 new daily Long Beach flights. If all were approved, the total daily flights would exceed the cap by two.

*

People waiting to board flights often say Long Beach is a passenger’s dream airport, with long-term parking across the street from the terminal and stress-free boarding procedures.

The other day, Alan Gendler arrived by bicycle a few minutes before his America West flight to Phoenix, a rubber band still affixed to the bottom of his trouser leg to keep it from getting tangled in the drive chain.

“It’s a miracle,” said Gendler, who lives in Lakewood and parks his bicycle in a bike rack next to the terminal. “You know what the traffic would be like at LAX?”

The airport is a good deal all around, said Stanley M. Cobb Jr., president of the new Foster City-based Jet USA, which wants to run six flights a day to Baltimore and Newark.

“At other airports, the planes are pushed into a Congo line, then you wait 20 or 30 minutes to take off,” Cobb said. “All of that counts in your fuel burn. In Long Beach, you leave the terminal and you’re in the air in two minutes.”

A Southern California Assn. of Government (SCAG) study in the mid-1980s said that, because of its accessibility and central location in the metropolitan area, Long Beach Airport could handle about 22% of the region’s air traffic.

“It’s probably the most centrally located in terms of its proximity to where people live and work,” said Michael Armstrong, SCAG’s air transportation expert. “It’s even better than LAX.”

*

For as long as airplanes have been around, Long Beach has been a flying town. Early in the century, stunt pilots and barnstormers gravitated to the city’s beaches and open fields like June bugs to a street light.

In 1923, to get airplanes off the beach, the city set aside 150 acres on the north side of town for an airport. By the beginning of World War II, when Long Beach’s new Douglas plant was throwing itself into the war effort, the airport had tripled in size.

Long Beach Airport became the liftoff point for more than 9,000 World War II military aircraft.

Today, the airport is a deceptively quiet place, with a classic passenger terminal at the east end of the field--an imposing white building, slightly curved so that diners in The Prop Room on the second floor get the full panorama of the landing field through a huge, segmented picture window.

Despite the feeling of emptiness when airplanes aren’t racing down any of five runways, the airport is still busy. At the west end of the field, workers tinker with some of the 40 C-17 cargo airplanes that McDonnell Douglas is producing for the Air Force.

Sometimes they fire up the engines, irritating the residents with the penetrating wheeze of new jets. “It’s like white noise at a deafening decibel level,” said Carroll Lachnitt, a writer who lives nearby.

*

There are about 200 businesses operating at the airport--airplane servicing outfits, a hotel, Automobile Club of America, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s helicopter unit, air-freight transportation companies and others.

The 183-foot control tower handled 431,000 takeoffs and landings last year, making it one of the busiest in the nation in total air traffic.

“It’s a real diverse airport,” said Robert Patton, controller in charge, on a slow afternoon recently, keeping an eye on an approaching McDonnell Douglas craft. “We get business jets, general aviation, commercial carriers, helicopters and C-17s.”

Though there are still dozens of Cessnas and Beechcraft buzzing at the edges of the field, the economy has put a hurt on general aviation, airport officials say. The number of airplanes based in Long Beach shrank to 539 last year from its peak of 800 in 1988.

But it is the airlines that bring the jobs into the local economy--92 of them for each daily flight, studies have shown.

You don’t have to tell that to Airserve president McAchren. At the peak of airport passenger jet activity, when almost 1.5 million passengers a year were going through the terminal, his company was servicing 26 flights a day.

“I had 70 people on the payroll,” McAchren said. “Today we have 20 people working for us, and I think we’ll end up with 14.”

*

As with many people in airport-related businesses, McAchren blames the “political” way in which the airport is administered, with city officials paying more attention to neighborhood groups than to the business community. “There’s a feeling here at the airport that the city hasn’t been user-friendly,” McAchren said.

As the passenger business has declined in Long Beach, other airports in the region have shown marked increases in total passengers. According to a SCAG study, as Long Beach’s total of commercial passengers was plummeting by more than 50% between 1990 and 1993, the number for the region as a whole increased from about 60 million to 66 million.

The problem is that the city hasn’t adequately marketed its airport because of neighborhood pressures to keep it small, merchants say.

As the city prepares to open its expanded and remodeled $112-million Convention Center in August, the absence of a selling program for the airport is especially worrisome, Yellow Cab’s Rouse said.

“I don’t understand why they build a Convention Center, then nail the front door shut,” Rouse said.

Airport manager Chris Kunze says there is little money for marketing in his $11-million budget, which relies on the airport’s shrinking revenues. But city officials have, among other things, hosted special events for travel agents, attended trade shows and shaved parking fees for cars to try to give Long Beach a competitive edge.

Kunze’s hope is that Long Beach can carve out a niche, with airlines such as Cobb’s Jet USA establishing a base at the airport for discount flights.

Ideally, the new airlines would give Long Beach a higher profile, as Jet America did in the 1980s before it was taken over by Alaska Airlines in 1987, Kunze said. “It was Long Beach-based and it started flying a lot of flights to Chicago and Dallas,” Kunze said.

More important, it advertised its Long Beach location on billboards and in newspapers.

*

Airport businesses are skeptical about the new airlines’ prospects.

To date, only Sun Jet International, a Florida-based airline that wants to take over the two American flights, has financing. The others, aside from Jet USA, are California Air Corridor’s The Coast Airlines, which has applied for 24 flights along the Pacific Coast, and Belize International, hoping for a daily flight to Belize.

“One of the questions I’ve been asking them is, ‘What makes you think you can make money at Long Beach Airport when the majors have had to pull out?’ ” McAchren said.

Cobb concedes that Jet USA will be “a very small fish in a great big pond,” but he thinks there’s a market for it. “It’s going to be low frills, bare bones and low prices, attracting (business) people who don’t have a lot of time to plan ahead,” he said.

But nowadays, the most successful airlines have been flooding new routes with frequent flights, rather than starting out small, said SCAG’s Armstrong. “If there are a lot of flights to a destination a passenger is interested in, that’s the airport he’ll choose,” he said.

Long Beach, with its 41-flight cap, poses too many constraints on the airlines pursuing that kind of a strategy, Armstrong said. Competition from other airports with fewer limitations, as well as the possibility that the El Toro Marine Air Base in Orange County may go private in 1996, could signal Long Beach’s doom as a commercial airport, he said.

“Long Beach is going to have to do some soul searching to figure out what comes first--the economy of the city or the noise environment of the communities around the airport,” Armstrong said.

It is precisely what the city has been doing for almost 20 years, said Kellogg.

“Take the cap off and I guarantee you, Long Beach might have an active airport to go along with an active seaport,” he said, “but we won’t have the good-quality neighborhoods. The airport isn’t going to be the economic engine that will drive this city into prosperity.”

On the Cover

Things are slow in the middle of the day at Long Beach Airport, which has scaled back its operations significantly in the past few years. Starting next month it will have only seven commercial flights daily.

Airlines’ Daily Flights Long Beach Airport

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 Alaska 11 12 12 7 6 3 *American 6 7 5 5 2 0 America West 4 5 14 5 4 4 Continental 2 2 0 0 0 0 Delta 4 4 0 0 0 0 TWA 2 2 0 0 0 0 United 5 6 6 0 0 0 USAir 5 0 0 0 0 0 Cargo carriers Federal Express 1 2 3 3 2 2 UPS 0 1 1 1 1 1

*Last two daily flights are being eliminated June 16

Source: Long Beach Airport officials