Airport Needs Clear; Outcome Foggy

Though “airport” and “expansion” will always be fighting words from San Diego to Palmdale, it is possible to see the shape of Southern California’s response to the challenge of growing air traffic.

Briefly stated, this decade will see more cargo to airports in Ontario and the Inland Empire, more international traffic to Los Angeles International and a new airport at El Toro in Orange County that will alleviate but not solve shortages of airport capacity in Orange and San Diego counties.

Expansion is also envisioned for airports in Palmdale, Burbank and Long Beach, and for Tijuana to serve San Diego residents.

The region’s needs are daunting. From a total of roughly 98 million passengers a year at present, the Federal Aviation Administration estimates that Southern California’s passenger demand will increase by more than 80% to 180 million by 2020. Air cargo, increasing 8% a year, will grow from 3 million tons a year to more than 9 million tons by 2015.

In the battle to accommodate such increases and to give Southern California the air services it needs, watch developments in these three arenas:

Eastward Ho. Ontario Airport and new cargo ports at the former George Air Force Base and Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino County and March Air Force Base in Riverside County will help absorb the increase in air cargo. Rising volume has been spurred by the high-tech industry’s need for fast delivery of electronic parts and the enormous increase in overnight package services.

Ontario Airport is a hub for United Parcel Service, which will commence four flights a week to China from Ontario next April. Passenger traffic at Ontario will also leap, to 17 million annual passengers by 2015 from 6.5 million today.

Other airports will cater to chartered cargo carriers, flying goods to and from Asia, Mexico and Latin America. Southern California Logistics Airport (formerly George AFB) near Victorville receives two to three all-cargo 747 flights a week from Hong Kong.

March Global Cargo Port is open at March AFB, where the Air Force allows commercial operations under a joint-use agreement. March hopes for business from a new Philips Electronics warehouse and freight distribution facility nearby. San Bernardino International Airport, formerly Norton, is negotiating an agreement with Hillwood Corp., which developed an all-cargo airport in Fort Worth geared to cargo to and from Mexico.

International Gateway. LAX will remain the region’s predominant airport by a long stretch, but its plans to grow will be constrained by lawsuits in the years ahead.

LAX, which is crowding up at 64.5 million passengers and 2.2 million tons of cargo annually, plans to spend more than $10 billion to rebuild four runways, construct a new international terminal and add a connecting road to the 405 Freeway and an extension for the Green Line into the airport. LAX also proposes to extend the airport’s grounds by acquiring the premises of 200 businesses and 57 residences on nearby streets.

In January, Los Angeles World Airports, LAX’s governing agency, will issue 12,000-page environmental-impact statements to the federal and state governments on those plans. Then public hearings and lawsuits will commence.

El Segundo is leading a coalition of 83 cities objecting to LAX expansion. The coalition includes neighboring cities objecting to traffic congestion and aircraft noise and Inland Empire cities eager to attract air cargo business from LAX.

Ruth Galanter, Los Angeles City Council member for the airport area, also wants to limit LAX growth and to see international traffic grow at Palmdale Airport, which the city also owns. But few others give Palmdale much chance for expansion until population and industry build up in northern Los Angeles County. Projections by air travel experts estimate that Palmdale will serve 1.7 million commercial passengers annually by 2015.

Meanwhile, Lydia Kennard, executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, says LAX traffic will grow to 79 million annual passengers if nothing is done to the airport’s present layout. The result will be “incredible gridlock,” Kennard said.

LAX’s burden is complex. Although relatively small at 3,500 acres, compared with 20,000 acres for Chicago’s O’Hare, LAX has become one of the world’s main international airports. Yet it also must serve as a regional hub because travelers and freight from Orange and San Diego counties, lacking major airports of their own, use LAX too.

So LAX needs remodeling to handle international traffic, and it needs to hand off some commuter traffic that makes up one-third of the airport’s 750,000 annual flights.

An increase in capacity at Long Beach and Burbank airports would relieve some of LAX’s burden. But real relief must come in Orange and San Diego counties.

Southern Complex. The proposed airport at El Toro Marine Air Station was supposed to solve the airport shortage in Orange and San Diego counties but ran into severe objections.

A court decision last week gave El Toro a new lease on life by setting aside Measure F, an initiative that effectively prohibited airport construction. The decision is being appealed, but planning for El Toro is reviving. An airport with a capacity for 14 million annual passengers and domestic flights--half the original proposal for an international airport--is envisioned.

Even a scaled-down El Toro would take pressure off LAX, but limiting it to domestic flights would only reinforce the importance of LAX as Southern California’s international airport.

Orange County’s airport, John Wayne International in Costa Mesa, will also grow. Wayne is limited by local ordinance to 7 million annual passengers, but those restrictions come off in 2005 and traffic will grow to 9 million.

That leaves San Diego, where 500-acre Lindbergh Field accommodates 15 million annual passengers. Its ability to meet the future needs of the San Diego region, estimated at 25 million to 30 million annual passengers, is limited.

A new airport at the site of Miramar Marine Air Station is a proposed solution to San Diego’s problem, but the military is unlikely to give up ground.

So an original idea being circulated is that San Diego travelers and freight would use Rodriguez Airport in Tijuana, about a mile south of the U.S. border. A terminal with parking, check-in and customs facilities on the U.S. side of the border is envisioned, with passengers bused to planes.

Rodriguez would be an unconventional solution to part of Southern California’s airport problem. But unconventional thinking is what the region needs almost as much as it needs airports.

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LAX Expansion Proposal

Los Angeles International Airport wants to reconfigure its runways, build a new terminal and extend connections to freeways and trains to alleviate local street traffic. But its 12,000-page environmental impact statement, to be released in January, will run into lawsuits. LAX’s eventual future may be different from this diagram released in advance of the official Master Plan.

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Sources: Los Angeles World Airports, Times research