The Real LAX Issue: Safety
Those for or against the $12-billion Los Angeles International Airport expansion need to set aside their differences long enough to address the one thing that matters most, whether the airport grows or stays the same size: safety.
According to a Federal Aviation Administration study released last week, Los Angeles International Airport leads the nation’s busiest airports in the number of near collisions on runways. News like that should be as hard to ignore as, well, a Boeing 737 barreling down a runway, but experience tells us otherwise.
Take Burbank, where years of lawsuits and delays have kept the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport from replacing a terminal built for biplanes that is now too close to the runway to meet modern safety standards. Airport opponents see the proposed terminal as a Trojan horse for more flights and more noise and congestion. They rationalize their obstructionist tactics by saying that no plane has run into the old terminal yet.
The same could be said of near collisions at LAX. Close calls are rare, actual collisions much rarer. But in 1991 a departing commuter plane collided with an arriving jet, killing 34. Aviation history’s worst accident was a 1977 runway collision between two Boeing 747s in the Canary Islands that killed 582. Do we really want to pin our safety on the word “yet”?
Since deregulation of the airline industry left growth to the market, not local governments, frustrated airport neighbors across the country have adopted a scorched-earth approach to limiting noise and traffic. If improvements to aging, crowded airports can be blocked, they reason, then airlines will be forced to take their business elsewhere.
The problem is that most aging, crowded airports need updating to safely and efficiently handle the business they have now. And then there’s the need to meet soaring passenger and cargo demands, but that’s a topic for another day. Given the forces arrayed against expansion, the fastest way to fix safety problems is to separate the two issues.
Opponents of LAX expansion say they support safety improvements, just not changes that would allow the airport to handle more planes. This gets complicated when some changes--say, adding parallel taxiways between runways--would increase both safety and capacity.
As a candidate, Mayor-elect James K. Hahn initially gave the expansion plan his qualified support. As the race heated up, he signed a pledge to oppose it. To Mayor Hahn will fall the hard task of separating urgent safety needs from the contentious expansion debate--and convincing those whose support he courted to do the same.
