Planning Panel Backs Study Favorable to Cargo Flights : Aviation: The environment wouldn’t be hurt by departures from John Wayne Airport, report says.

The Orange County Planning Commission gave unanimous approval Tuesday to a controversial study saying that cargo flights from John Wayne Airport would have no significant impact on the area’s environment.

The study, approved after an anticlimactic public hearing, does not mean that air cargo companies may soon begin doing business at the airport.

Rather, the environmental study and the favorable finding by the Planning Commission will be sent to the Airport Commission, which will hold a hearing next week on whether to allow Federal Express and United Parcel Service to each have a daily departure from the airport. The hearing is set for 7 p.m. Nov. 30 in the terminal conference room at John Wayne Airport.

If the Airport Commission recommends the cargo flights, the Board of Supervisors will consider the issue at its Dec. 6 meeting.

In the study approved by the Planning Commission, the county’s Environmental Management Agency analyzed the environmental effects if two, four or six of the flights now carrying passengers were shifted to carry freight.

Planner Kari Rigoni told the commission any potential negative effects from the change would be limited to ground operations at the airport and could not be easily analyzed until the freight carriers have worked out leases with the airport.

Tuesday’s hearing was tame, with just four speakers--two for the freight companies--addressing the commission.

Noticeably absent were representatives from Newport Beach, Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, all of which sent letters to the county objecting to potential noise problems. Irvine officials largely were concerned with peak-hour traffic on streets serving the airport.

Of local cities, only Tustin sent a representative to speak at the hearing. Associate Planner Ann Bonner asked that if cargo flights are allowed, they be limited to middle- and low-range noise level craft.

Carolyn Wallace, a spokeswoman for the South Orange County Chambers of Commerce, voiced the business organization’s support for cargo flights. Local businesses must have “packages ready two or three hours earlier than” they would if there were cargo flights available within the county either from John Wayne or another airport within the county, she said.

Newport Beach did not send a spokesman, although city officials fear that allowing cargo flights would threaten a 10-year-old settlement of a lawsuit with the county over noise.

That agreement and a 1990 county Access Plan limit departing flights by noise-regulated aircraft to 73 per day. Passenger planes fill all those slots because passenger aircraft with at least 75 seats get preference. If cargo flights are approved to take any of the 73 slots, Newport Beach officials fear airlines will sue to get the flights back.

The cities oppose and the staff also recommended against simply adding two departures for a total of 75. Any change to the number of noise-controlled departures would make all the flights subject to Federal Aeronautics Administration scrutiny under a much more liberal 1990 federal noise/capacity law than the one in effect when the settlement was reached in 1985, Newport Beach City Atty. Robert Burnham said in an interview.

The city’s Airport Commission met in closed session Monday to discuss the potential threat to the settlement the city won in the federal court battle with the county, but details of that meeting, posted as a discussion of pending litigation, are protected by law.