For and Against the El Toro Airport

Re “FAA Builds a Stone Wall Around El Toro,” (Orange County Voices, Jan. 21): NIMBYs continue to repeat the Big Lie, over and over again. In this case, it is Leonard Kranser, telling us El Toro airport “is unsafe, unneeded and unwanted.”

The safety of El Toro airport is not the purview of Kranser or any other highly biased South County NIMBY. Rather it is a decision for the Federal Aviation Administration. How is it that these NIMBYs who are so against air traffic in Orange County (sporting “NO JETS AT EL TORO” bumper stickers) propose doubling or tripling the flights at John Wayne? In a word--hypocrisy.

El Toro airport is needed to serve our ever-growing population. All of us fly out of LAX, making a long commute that increases (in NIMBY parlance) “noise, traffic, and pollution.” The rates at John Wayne are exorbitant. Aviation is the fastest, most modern form of transportation we have. Yet the very same Luddites proposing the wasteful Trolly Folly (Orange County light rail) are opposed to El Toro airport--my own City Council in particular.

El Toro is surely “unwanted” by South County NIMBYs. They just failed to make their case in 1994. Or 1995. Or 1996, when they should have. Their vicious attacks on the Board of Supervisors, together with their attempt to see if something--anything--they throw up against the wall will stick are sorry and very belated excuses for their selfishness.

JOHN JAEGER

Irvine

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I enjoy reading Leonard Kranser’s articles, letters and quotations in The Times because they are always carefully worded, always anti-El Toro airport, and always wrong. But his big article departs from the usual. He seems more upset that John Wayne Airport may be closed than that El Toro will be opened.

While purporting to accuse the FAA of a cover-up, he admits there are spies inside the FAA who provide things anyway. Also, the information he wants from the FAA is available in the draft Environmental Impact Report 573 (EIR573). Perhaps he can find the paragraphs about closing JWA. I doubt it.

Kranser, whose claims to fame are Measure F and a computer bulletin board, should support the proposed OCX, not fight it. When the big jets begin to fly, it should be quieter at his house than now.

DON NYRE

Newport Beach

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Re “Camp Pendleton Is Not a Good Airport Option,” (Letters, Jan. 21):

Airport Working Group director Barbara Lichman, arguing the agreeable premise that Pendleton is an inappropriate commercial airport site, states in her letter: “Several years before, our county government had made an agreement with Newport Beach officials to find another suitable airport site if the city would allow a John Wayne Airport expansion.”

What the AWG and Lichman continuously omit from this argument, whenever this blue ribbon committee study is referred to, is that El Toro was also at the bottom of that list of proposed airport sites because of residential encroachment and glaring safety issues. In the same letter, Lichman stretches her credibility with the statement: “By the way, it was not Newport Beach that objected to Pendleton at public meetings during that time, but--you guessed it--South County people. Yes, the same ones who now oppose and are fighting the El Toro airport.”

She refers to the protest outcry from San Clemente, the same people who retained her to help them successfully fight the proposed expansion, by the Marines, of an airstrip near the city. Talk about biting the hand.

DON DUCA

Laguna Niguel