New Terminal Weighed for Commuter Planes at Los Angeles Airport

The small turboprop airplanes used by airlines to fly to smaller cities throughout the state may soon be banned from pulling up to the main gates at Los Angeles International Airport.

Instead, the smaller airplanes will have to park at new facilities several hundred feet away from the terminals and passengers would be bused to and from the main building.

The city’s Board of Airport Commissioners gave approval Tuesday for the airport to develop a plan relocating commuter airplanes somewhere beyond the airport’s eight terminals. After the study, it should take about 1 1/2 years to make the transition, officials said.

At the airport, one of every three planes is a commuter craft that carries 20 to 50 passengers, but such flights accounted for only 2.6 million of the 58 million passengers who used the airport last year.

The board’s decision was welcomed by some airlines that have wanted to add more jet flights but couldn’t find a free gate. It was bad news for large airlines that have a fleet of small planes to serve smaller cities.

However, airport officials say this is the best way to handle the burgeoning air traffic that makes Los Angeles International one of the busiest airports in the world. Other air facilities such as San Diego International Airport and Denver International Airport already have special commuter terminals. Washington National Airport is planning to build a nine-gate commuter airline terminal to serve USAirways Express.

At the Los Angeles airport, the main problem is smaller planes getting boxed in by bigger airplanes and vice versa, which results in delays getting out of the gates and onto the runways.

“It’s a little like rush-hour traffic on the freeway with everyone trying to get on the same freeway at the same time,” said Michael DiGirolamo, director of airport operations. “We’re trying to spread it out. It is also for passengers’ convenience. You don’t want to sit on a plane for 30 to 45 minutes waiting to get to the runway for a 20-minute flight.”

The plan was met with open arms by Southwest Airlines, which has 119 flights a day out of the airport and wants to add more planes but can’t because of a gate shortage, said John Chaussee, the airline’s senior property manager. Southwest has no small commuter planes flying out of the airport.

But the idea to bus commuter passengers to a remote terminal did not please companies such as American Airlines.

American’s commuter airline, American Eagle, has 65 flights a day out of the airport, flying to cities such as Monterey, San Diego, Fresno, Palm Springs and Carlsbad. About 60% of American Eagle’s passengers transfer to American Airlines planes within the same terminal, said American Eagle spokesman Tim Kincaid.

“We think it would be damaging to our services even if [the airport] used the fastest, most sophisticated people mover system,” Kincaid said. “We have to do that at other airports and customers don’t like it. Operationally, it makes it harder to transfer bags, make connections and increases our costs.”

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For four years, United Express, which handles United Airlines’ 100 daily commuter flights to 18 cities, has been flying out of a remote location near the airlines’ maintenance building. From Gate 71A or 71B in Terminal 7, commuter passengers board a shuttle bus to be taken several hundred yards east of the airport past Sepulveda Boulevard.

Using this system has freed two gates for United Airlines. “It has worked well,” said United Airlines spokesman Alan Wayne. Delta, like American, currently offers commuter flights out of its terminal gates. Los Angeles International Airport is also home to an individual small commuter airline, Trans State, which would be affected by the move.

Airport officials are thinking of moving the commuter airlines to an area west of the Tom Bradley International Terminal. But whatever is done will probably only be a temporary measure because the airport is developing a master plan to accommodate 60% more passengers by the year 2015.

Until the 1980s, commuter airplanes had their own passenger terminal at LAX. But the commuter terminal was torn down to build the Tom Bradley International Terminal, which opened for the 1984 Summer Olympics.