Airport Objections and Directions

* I am amazed by the lack of facts concerning the conversion of El Toro to a commercial airport.

El Toro Airport is 4,700 acres with a 13,750-acre noise buffer zone, as opposed to John Wayne Airport, 470 acres with the 405 freeway and Bristol Street as a noise buffer zone.

If El Toro is developed into a commercial airport, the land will be given to us by the government. If it is developed into anything else, the county will have to buy the land.

What will become of the 13,750-acre noise buffer zone if the land is not an airport? A weed patch? In addition to the proposed airport, there is enough land left over to include a park and other recreational facilities. If the El Toro Airport is not built, John Wayne Airport will expand despite any rhetoric to the contrary and all the cities in the John Wayne flight corridor from Anaheim Hills to the ocean will be further impacted.

FLORENCE STASCH

Newport Beach

* The correct answer to A. Gallagher’s question in the Sept. 26 letter about why Supervisor Tom Wilson hadn’t thought of making El Toro smaller, securing a curfew so there would be no late-night flights, restrict noise, number of flights and types of aircraft, is simple.

We already have a perfectly beautiful, right-size airport that does all that. The use of John Wayne is declining, and we don’t need another airport.

The real question is why would any county spend $5 billion on another one six miles away? Absurd and a waste of money that we don’t have.

ROBERT F. JONES

Irvine

* The long-suffering residents of Newport Beach have been shouldering the transportation needs of Orange County for decades.

But they should not even compare John Wayne to the mega-airport that the business leaders have convinced our supervisors we need.

They are comparing apples and oranges. Yes, they have put up with a noisy airport, but what we are fighting here is an airport they and we have never seen or imagined.

STEVE BONHALL

Rancho Santa Margarita