New Call for Study on Flights

A member of the House aviation committee renewed a congressional call Friday to federal officials to reexamine the crowded Southern California airspace, especially in light of new data showing 150 new flights a day out of a proposed international airport at El Toro.

Rep. Steven T. Kuykendall (R-Rancho Palos Verdes) asked Federal Aviation Administration Chief Jane Garvey to include plans for El Toro in a national airspace study, which the FAA already has begun for the East Coast.

“Southern California must be made a priority,” Kuykendall said in a statement. “The skies are already crowded. In the wake of recent events surrounding El Toro, this study has become that much more important.”

As many as 150 flights a day leaving El Toro to the north would have to fly over, under or through flight paths for four other major airports, including Los Angeles International, according to Orange County aviation consultants. Air traffic controllers would have to separate outbound El Toro traffic shortly after takeoff from planes preparing to land at John Wayne Airport and Long Beach Municipal.

A union official for the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn. this week labeled the situation unsafe and said it would place an intolerable workload on controllers. Officials with the Air Line Pilots Assn. also have protested the riskiness of El Toro departures over Loma Ridge off the end of the northern runway.

Orange County officials and consultants say the new flights can be managed safely and that delays would be insignificant. About one-third of the flights would leave to the north, with the rest taking off to the east, planners said. The county hopes to open the airport in 2005, though the project has been hit with a series of delays. It is being designed to handle 28.8 million passengers a year by 2020.

FAA officials have declined to comment on specifics of the county’s plan, saying they will conduct a separate environmental and safety review.

Concerns over the complexity of Southern California airspace escalated in 1986, when 81 people were killed in the collision of a private plane and an airliner bound for LAX over Cerritos. A task force of Southern California aviation interests has met for the past two years discussing ways to make local skies safer.

Pilots regard Southern California as the nation’s second most complex airspace. In July, the FAA began its airspace redesign study in the New York-New Jersey area, where four airports cause planes to converge over LaGuardia International, John F. Kennedy International, Newark and Teterboro airports.

In October, Kuykendall and 16 other members of California’s congressional delegation wrote Garvey, urging that Southern California be given priority in the airspace study. Garvey said the request would be considered.

Other voices this week joined in the warnings raised about the planned El Toro airport. The former associate administrator of the FAA, who has been critical of several aspects of the county’s plans, said the flying public would be endangered if flight paths aren’t changed.

Don Segner, who served as the third-ranking FAA official in Washington from 1981 to 1986, said the only way the new airport could be made acceptably safe is to close John Wayne and change the orientation of El Toro’s runways so planes wouldn’t depart or land over nearby mountains. He said the environmental documents present “even more negative [concerns] from an operational standpoint.”

“We’re going to be putting the public in harm’s way,” said Segner of Laguna Beach, now an executive for a company that coordinates medical evacuations. “[El Toro] would probably be the least safe airport of its type in the U.S. I hope that the FAA will do the right thing.”

But an official with the Air Transport Assn., which represents the nation’s airlines, said there will always be integration issues when a new airport is added to the system.

“Only people outside the industry talk about safety,” said Neil Bennett, the ATA’s Western regional director in Los Angeles. “Within the industry, safety is an absolute. If it’s not safe, we don’t do it.”

Regarding El Toro, he said, “We’re going to come up with procedures that work for us and the noise [affected] community.”