Night Flights Break Rules, Activists Say

Noisy nighttime flight patterns at Los Angeles International Airport are violating LAX’s own restrictions on takeoffs and landings over Inglewood, local officials and activists complained Wednesday.

Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn and others based their allegations on an LAX study documenting flight patterns in September and are demanding relief. “The residents of this city must have a time to get some sleep,” Dorn said.

Airport officials say September weather problems, primarily winds, caused safety concerns, so there was an increase in low and noisy flight patterns over the city between midnight and 6 a.m. when the patterns usually are supposed to be concentrated over the ocean.

Airport Deputy Executive Roger Johnson said LAX has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to review logs for September to find out whether the night flight patterns over Inglewood were in fact necessary for safety.

“What the report identifies is what people in Inglewood have always known--that even though the airport has agreed to have nighttime operations take off over the water, they are taking off over our homes, and it’s not due to weather change,” said Mike Stevens, an Inglewood resident and president of the group LAX Expansion No!

About 10,000 planes land at LAX during daylight hours, the majority flying low over Inglewood. Since nighttime flights began in 1972, the airport has promised to give the city’s residents some quiet sleep time by directing that both takeoffs and landings be mainly over the ocean.

The recent data show that about 50 planes per night flew low over Inglewood during 10 days in September.

“The airport is in violation of what it said it wouldn’t do, and despite what they say, it’s not an abnormal situation,” said El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordan, whose city borders the runways.

Inglewood mayor Dorn agreed. “When 1,000 planes fly over the city during the day and 50 planes fly over at night that should be flying over the ocean, that’s telling the people of Inglewood, ‘You don’t matter,’ ” Dorn said.

Dorn said he is waiting for further information from the FAA before he decides what the city’s next course of action will be, but he called the report a small victory.

LAX spokeswoman Nancy Castle said flights land from the east only when there are heavy easterly winds. Ocean winds also occasionally force departing planes to take off toward the east.

“This doesn’t occur all the time, and even during an evening, it’s not necessarily all the time. Winds could change during the night,” she said.

Officials in LAX’s environmental management office acknowledge, however, that even mild winds can make it difficult for heavier planes to depart. Nighttime flights are frequently cargo planes, which weigh more than passenger planes.

Since 1982, Inglewood has received more than $100 million in noise mitigation funds from the FAA’s airport improvement program. The money has been used to acquire land in areas under the heaviest air traffic and in some cases to help soundproof homes.

Stevens, the opponent of airport expansion, said the mitigation funds are only a Band-Aid. He contended that the area’s problem will be solved only when the nighttime cargo loads are diverted to other airports.

Some Inglewood residents are frustrated by the plane noise, but feel helpless. Rogelio Gamargo said he frequently feels his 104th Street house shaking in the early morning. The noise sometimes wakes up and scares his 2-year-old grandson. “But you live here, you become accustomed to it. What are you going to do?” Gamargo said he was not aware that any nighttime flight limitations existed.