Reaction Is Loud to First El Toro Tests

Mock commercial flights at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station came later and less often than expected Friday, but otherwise delivered what they were supposed to: noise.

Both supporters and opponents of county plans to convert the base into a major international airport were out--some with decibel-measuring monitors in hand, all with their ears to the sky--hoping to get the measurements that would make their case.

For those who support a major airport, the demonstration gave worthwhile information to residents who have yet to make up their minds on the fate of the 4,700-acre base.

For those opposed, the demonstration was flawed and the decibel levels nonetheless justified their long-held contentions that the jets are too noisy.

The $1.3-million flight demonstration, arranged by Orange County officials, are to continue today with flights from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The proposed airport would handle as many as 28.8 million passengers a year by 2020.

Despite repeated claims by airport foes that the test is worthless, supporters said they remained confident the weather-plagued demonstration would be worthwhile.

“We haven’t gotten much feed-back, except from the dyed-in-the-wool anti-airport people, but they’re not the ones who this demonstration is for,” said Supervisor Charles V. Smith, chairman of the county board’s pro-airport majority.

“The demonstration is to help people who haven’t made up their minds. If we accomplish that, it’ll be worthwhile,” he said.

The county’s acoustical consultant said results wouldn’t be made public for at least two weeks. But unofficial monitoring showed decibel readings in residential areas ranging from 70 to 107. Vacuum cleaners produce noise at 85 decibels.

Airport opponents said the flights still were louder than acceptable in residential areas.

“If this is a snapshot, and this snapshot is going to turn into a film with planes coming in every few minutes, it’s absolutely incompatible with any type of outdoor use,” said Dave Christensen, an Irvine councilman who was part of a group of protesters at Leisure World in Laguna Woods when the first jet flew over.

The flights were supposed to show South County residents that commercial jets flying out of an El Toro airport wouldn’t be as noisy as they feared. Bert Hack, 70, was unpersuaded.

“I’m sitting here in my house with the door shut. It was a roar,” Hack, mayor pro tem of Laguna Woods, said after a Boeing 747-400 flew less than 1,000 feet over his Leisure World home. “‘I caught it for a minute and a half. It startles you.”

Others were less bothered.

“I didn’t see what the big deal was,” said Imogene Holkestad, a 15-year resident of Leisure World, a gated community for senior citizens. She was swimming laps in a pool when the 747 flew over her head. “After all, having an airport close is a convenience for us.”

Airport opponents argued that the demonstration was rigged, sending underloaded planes along northern and eastern paths that, they contend, federal aviation officials will veto for routine commercial use.

And the last-minute scrubbed flights, they said, proved the county’s pledge of east- and north-bound flights was unreliable.

“It’s just another bait-and-switch,” said Meg Waters, spokeswoman for the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority, a consortium of eight South County cities opposed to the conversion. “This whole thing is much ado about nothing.”

The demonstrations were to have started with the 6 a.m. arrival and 7 a.m. departure of the Boeing 747-400 wide-body jet to simulate the noise from an international flight.

Low morning cloud cover, though, led controllers to divert the flight to the Ontario airport because El Toro’s foul-weather landing system had already been removed in advance of the base closure on July 2.

The 747 was summoned back shortly after 8 a.m., only to fly in a holding pattern over the Pacific Ocean before controllers ordered it to return to Ontario--leading some onlookers to dub the flight “The Phantom Menace.”

“It was just killing time, hoping the cloud cover would lift,” said Ellen Call, spokeswoman for Orange County’s El Toro planning office.

The scrubbed morning test still drew more than 50 calls to a special complaint line from 6 to 10:30 a.m., Call said. More complaints arrived by e-mail.

“I don’t know what they would have heard,” she said. “They were absolutely not hearing that 747.”

Airport opponents, though, said the plane could be clearly heard circling off Laguna Beach.

County testers placed 10 noise monitors beneath El Toro’s southern approach route and the northern and eastern departure routes to measure the flights’ sounds. The black tripod-mounted boxes hold a microphone to record decibel levels, which are then printed out.

Officials treated the devices like shrines, trying to keep would-be observers away. One worker stationed at the Salt Creek Beach monitor in Dana Point early Friday shooed away David Ellis, a consultant for the pro-El Toro Airport Working Group, who showed up to watch the monitor.

“He was a nice guy, but he said he’d been instructed to talk to no one” about how much noise the planes produced, Ellis said.

But some unofficial readings were available.

Monitors in Aliso Viejo, for example, recorded 81 decibels from a Boeing 767 and 87 decibels from the 747, as each plane descended for landing.

A hand-held sound monitor in Irvine’s Northwood neighborhood recorded 71 decibels--slightly quieter than a telephone ring--from a departing Boeing 767.

In Lake Forest, resident Mike Brooks said he recorded 64 decibels when the 747 landed about six miles west of his house, and 68 decibels when the 767 took off to the east. Another monitor near the Irvine Spectrum recorded a range from 94 to 107--nearly as loud as a circular saw--as the 747 landed, said David Kirkey, an airport opponent who operated the monitor.

“This is consistent with what I recorded at LAX,” Kirkey said.

For some, the sound to their ears mattered more than what the monitors might ultimately report.

“It was terrible,” said Ed Hofeller, who is in charge of temple services at Leisure World. “Try to deliver a sermon with that kind of noise.”

The county’s plans, developed after a 1994 referendum, call for converting 2,000 acres of the base into an international airport, reserve 1,000 acres for a wildlife sanctuary and convert the remaining 1,700 acres into parklands.

Critics say the airport could weaken South County real estate prices. But some real estate agents remain optimistic that the plans ultimately will die.

“The rumor was that a lot of Realtors weren’t going to hold open houses [today] because of the flight test,” said real estate agent Duane Beisner of the Beisner Group in Laguna Hills. “I wouldn’t postpone my open house because that throws up a red flag that this airport is going to go through.”

Still, he said the demonstration would likely keep people away from a planned open house in Laguna Hills’ Nellie Gail Ranch, about six miles south of El Toro, but “it shouldn’t be too detrimental.”

Times staff writers Bonnie Harris, E. Scott Reckard, Phil Willon and Eleanor Yang contributed to this report.

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Friday Flight Tests

Unofficial results from Orange County and private monitors registered a wide range of decibel readings during Friday’s weather-plagued flight demonstrations at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. Official readings won’t be available for two weeks, county officials said.

Graphics Reporting by BRADY MacDONALD/ Los Angeles Times Source: Local El Toro support and opposition groups and Times Orange County.

Noise Tests: Day 2

County-run commercial jet joise tests continue today. Thirty-two flights--up from the original 28--are scheduled to land at or depart from the El Toro Marine Base.