Burbank Airport

Your “Airport Feud on Wrong Course” (April 6) editorial was just slightly off target.

You’re right about the legal battles imposing multimillion-dollar legal costs on Burbank taxpayers and all airport travelers. And you’re right that the airport has no authority to give the city the cap and curfew on flights it demands.

But you’ve missed the clear history of the problem. That is, there’s nothing left to give. The appointed members of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority have been compromising for the past 20 years in what reasonable persons would agree has been a sincere effort to reduce the airport’s impact on its neighbors in general and Burbank residents in particular.

Noise-impacted homes today number a fraction of what they were in 1977, thanks to agreements the airport has negotiated with the air carriers. Also, the airport’s voluntary curfew on scheduled airline flights keeps almost all large aircraft takeoffs and landings within reasonable hours. The airport has insulated several neighboring schools and is trying to move forward with insulating homes nearest the field. The only thing left is for the airport to wither and die, taking another huge chunk of the Valley’s economy with it.

It’s time for Burbank city officials to do a bit more compromising of their own and offer a proposal that is in line with what the airport can do and what millions of travelers need now: a terminal that will serve the public well into the new century.

JAMES E. FOY

North Hollywood