El Toro: A Planning Nightmare
The conversion of the El Toro Marine base to an international airport is now in serious trouble. As a City Council member in Villa Park, I have been serving as a board member of the Orange County Regional Airport Authority since 1998 and have been increasingly frustrated with the way Orange County has insisted on operating this future commercial airport.
My aviation experience includes 45 years as a pilot, 30 years of that with United Airlines, and I was a Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controller with experience in planning future airway systems. I have also served as the Air Line Pilots Assn. air traffic control coordinator for this region.
Orange County has been bogged down in a nightmare process of completing a required environmental impact report for a seriously flawed airport operating plan. The county’s premise that the flight plan established for military operations must be utilized at any cost is just the beginning of the saga.
The strong need to protect future developments took precedence over existing residents’ rights. The county plans flights over and near hundreds of thousands of residents in order to avoid flying over currently open spaces, which can be rezoned.
This has set the stage for a plan that requires pilots to land and take off with the prevailing wind instead of into it. The two preferred departure runways in this convoluted plan are uphill and toward rapidly rising terrain. This errant plan has not survived the scrutiny of aviation professionals.
The county plan has been given to engineering firms with instructions to make it work. When the county received thousands of comments on its EIR, staff put a concerted effort into downplaying many of the concerns. They staunchly defend their plan as sacred.
How can the FAA let this happen? The FAA administrator has instructed various departments to study only the plans of airport operators, despite their charge to promote the safe flow of traffic. Consequently, local governments are now developing special-interest airport operating plans, which the FAA has to make work. As shown in minutes of meetings with the FAA, Orange County supervisors and their staff have repeatedly told the FAA not to study any other airport operating plans.
The FAA has contracted with its aviation research and engineering experts, the Mitre Corp., to study the effects on the area’s air traffic flows if the proposed plan is utilized. The same admonishment to study only the county’s plan has resulted in an incomplete conclusion. However, Mitre’s conclusion does state that departures to the north seem to require the use of airspace that is not available.
Mitre recommends a redesigned procedure. This shows that heavy departures just cannot be accommodated to the north the way that the county is planning.
To solve this problem, the FAA has considered as one option a new procedure that could affect an even greater number of people to the west-northwest of the El Toro airport. That would be over north Irvine, Tustin, Orange, Villa Park and Anaheim Hills, alternating with the arrivals into John Wayne Airport.
There are other ways to operate this airport. Simply by arriving from the north over vast open space, departing to the south, with a slight right turn, and climbing to the coast over vast open space. That is, arrive over the high terrain into the wind and take off toward the ocean into the wind.
British Airways is successfully operating a 777 into San Diego, which has a much steeper approach to a much shorter runway than a landing to the south at El Toro. The county environmental impact report says this cannot be done! It is full of similar inaccuracies and assumptions in an attempt to condemn any alternate plans.
The county claims that they cannot make changes to the EIR because it would delay the conveyance of the airport from the Navy Department. The EIR process is designed to produce a project that will have less impact by making changes.
When the FAA amends the northwesterly departure routes, they will be changing the EIR to create far worse impacts. This double standard is creating growing disgust among many airport supporters. Once the airport is under the county’s control they will be unable to make changes without yet another EIR.
I have now given up on the accomplishment of the safest and quietest airport at El Toro. I am therefore recommending that the Villa Park City Council withdraw from the Orange County Regional Airport Authority, a coalition of pro-airport cities. Our continued participation would imply that we condone this ill-conceived abomination.
