Life in the Jet Scream : Aviation: Residents near Santa Monica Airport are impatient over delays in erecting a $300,000 sound buffer wall, which is finally set to go up in August.

Norman Ernst isn’t a pilot, but he knows all about airplanes, especially jets. He knows what they sound like, what they smell like and how much his bedroom window vibrates when one takes off from Santa Monica Airport.

“There’s one--can you smell it?” he shouts over the whine of a corporate jet as the plane revs its engines at the east end of the runway, less than 300 yards from Ernst’s Sardis Avenue home.

Airport officials admit life at the east end of the runway is not pleasant when jets spew fumes across Centinela Boulevard and into yards in Ernst’s Mar Vista neighborhood. But airport Manager Tim Walsh said the problem will soon be resolved. After two years of delay, a new $300,000 blast wall is scheduled to go up in August, he said.

“We’ve been designing a wall that will fit down there,” Walsh said. “We’re concerned about what happens in that neighborhood and we feel this wall will solve the problem.”

The 14-foot-high wall will stretch 250 feet along the east end of the runway. It will sit on the hillside just below the runway elevation, where the jet exhaust its thickest. Walsh said the noise will decrease by 9 decibels, “a pretty significant reduction,” and eliminate virtually all soot and wind blasts from the jets.

Construction will take about 60 days, Walsh said, and much of the work will be done at night so the airport can remain open during the day.

At least for the moment, that’s small consolation for Ernst.

The acrid smell of jet fuel wafts through his open second-floor window as jets roar down the runway. The blast from their engines bends trees, rips oil-recycling banners that hang from street lampposts and chokes the air with soot.

“Believe it or not, I don’t hate the airport,” said Ernst, a retired cable maintenance supervisor for GTE who bought his home in 1953. “But I can’t stand those jets. People shouldn’t have to live this way.”

Jet traffic has always been a point of contention at Santa Monica Airport, the nation’s busiest single-runway airport. Neighbors say the jets don’t belong, but the Federal Aviation Administration, which has jurisdiction over the airport, says that if the planes meet noise and weight standards they can use the airfield.

Ernst and some of his neighbors say the airport has promised them a blast wall before but failed to provide one. They say at least 15 jets a day use the airport. A visit there earlier this week found jets taking off about once every half hour in the afternoon.

“It’s not the single-engine planes I care about,” Ernst said. “Those things are quieter than the cars going by. I just can’t believe no one is willing to do anything about solving this. If nothing else, it’s a health risk. I know breathing those fumes can’t be good for you.”

Ernst and his wife, Virginia, have gone so far as to make a videotape of every jet they see belching fumes toward their home. The tape, six months in the making, is now 20 minutes long. The couple have shown it to the airport manager and other officials.

They aren’t the only ones with complaints. Avi Roisman has owned the Unocal station at the corner of National and Centinela boulevards for 20 years. To have a telephone conversation, Roisman often has to close his office door to cut down the noise from jets preparing to take off.

“When one of those three-engine jets gets ready to take off, the whole garage shakes,” he said. “I don’t just know about the jets; I live them. They keep getting bigger and bigger. I’m waiting for the first jumbo jet to come in for a landing.”

Walsh, the airport manager, admits that the airfield serves more jets than it did five years ago. Few jets could use the airport in the past because most jets exceeded the field’s noise limits; but more can now because older jets have been replaced by newer, quieter planes. Still, Walsh said about 35% of the corporate jets in use still cannot use Santa Monica Airport because they are too loud.

Earlier this year, neighbors complained to Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude’s office about the problem. The issue was referred to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which placed two monitors at the east end of the runway.

The AQMD said they had done studies in the area and found “the results are typical of the ambient background levels of air contamination normally found in the Santa Monica area.” Until the blast wall goes up, Ernst promises to keep showing his videotape to airport officials and local politicians. And he’ll keep weeding his yard. He says every weed that chokes the hillside next to the airport is now a part of his lawn. The seeds were blown over by the jets and took root.

“Even my lawn suffers because of this,” he said.