Eye in the Sky

In the war on traffic congestion in the San Fernando Valley, the California Highway Patrol is calling in air support.

A CHP pilot project is using a small plane to get a bird’s-eye view of the Valley’s snarled freeway network and to relay more timely and more accurate information to patrol cars.

Earlier in the year, the CHP debuted a separate gridlock-busting program of more than a dozen motorcycle and patrol officers whose sole job is to find and remove stalled cars, road debris and other obstacles--instead of writing tickets--along a 5 1/2-mile Valley stretch of the Ventura Freeway.

The $380,000 Cessna 206 Turbo Stationair will be the first CHP plane in the state used primarily to patrol freeways. Like those officers whose mission is not to write tickets, the CHP said, the aircraft’s pilots will not lay radar traps for speeders.

“This plane is patrolling a beat. That is their mission,” said Chief Michael Brown of the CHP’s Southern Division, which includes Los Angeles. “With the volume of traffic in L.A., I don’t see this aircraft being used for traffic violations.”

In a demonstration flight Thursday, the Cessna winged over the infamous interchange at the San Diego and Ventura freeways. At 11 a.m., the traffic 1,000 feet below on the northbound 405 was still sluggish.

“We see congestion where there is no cause,” said pilot Jim Griffith, above the hum of the aircraft. “We find out the accident is cleared and people have slowed down even after the roadway is open.”

Brown said the Highway Patrol added the plane to the Valley traffic beat because the new detail of motorcycle and patrol officers on the Ventura Freeway proved successful. The officers have responded to 800 to 1,000 calls a month, he said. An older Cessna that first took to the Valley skies in March has handled about 200 incidents.

After Gov. Gray Davis appropriated funds last year for 14 new planes, Brown said, his department decided to deploy one to the Valley for rush hours.

The plane is cheaper to buy and operate than a helicopter, Brown said. Choppers are used for freeway monitoring, but that’s not their only duty.

The aircraft, which can cruise at 160 mph, will commute to the Valley from its CHP hangar at the Fullerton Airport. It can make a loop of all the Valley freeways in about 15 minutes, swifter than a traffic helicopter, whose top speed is about 115 mph, said civil engineering professor Adolph May of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley.

May, a former Canoga Park resident who is all too familiar with the area’s traffic jams, said the plane also can stay in the air longer.

It’s a challenge to monitor the Valley, which is about 24 miles long, officials said. Sensors embedded in the freeway can’t determine if a tie-up is caused by an old mattress in the road or a fender bender, and there aren’t enough roadside cameras to zoom in on the entire system, they added.

The plane “could be a command center in the sky,” said Dana Gabbard, executive secretary of the Southern California Transit Advocates.

Both May and Gabbard think a cost-to-benefit study, to be completed by the CHP at the end of next month, will help determine if the plane is worth its expense.

“But we shouldn’t look at it just as how much it costs, but what it brings us,” Gabbard said. “Traffic has evolved to the point where it’s considered a factor in the viability of the region.”