Pilots Decry Sea Gull Proliferation

Santa Paula Airport officials complained Tuesday that the Toland Road Landfill expansion has attracted increasing numbers of sea gulls to the area, citing one instance in which a bird smashed through a private plane’s windshield as the aircraft was attempting to land.

Bruce Dickenson, a member of the airport association’s board of directors, showed up at the county Board of Supervisors’ meeting Tuesday, holding a piece of the broken windshield.

Dickenson said that a sea gull dove into the windshield of the small Cessna aircraft on the afternoon of March 7 as the plane was making its way to the airport. The incident occurred while the plane was 2,500 feet off the ground.

The pilot of the plane, Fred Austin, and two passengers were not injured in the incident, Dickenson said.

“The pilot got out of the airplane white as a ghost and said, ‘We were hit by a sea gull,’ ” Dickenson said. “He saw it and identified it before it hit.”

Dickenson blamed the incident on the expanded Toland Road Landfill nearby, which he said attracts more sea gulls to the area, and therefore creates more hazardous conditions for pilots.

Representatives of the Ventura Regional Sanitation District, the public agency that operates the landfill, have repeatedly said that the dump does not attract sea gulls. They said that the sea gulls and other birds are attracted to the area by the nearby Santa Clara River.

But Supervisor Kathy Long, whose district includes the airport and the landfill, said she was concerned about the recent incident and would set up a meeting between airport officials and the landfill operator.