Plenty of Turbulence

“Larry-and-the-airport.” That’s the shorthand. The conflict has gone on for so long that shorthand is enough. Sometimes the words come with a chuckle, as in, “That kooky Larry-and-the-airport.” Sometimes they’re bitter. (“That #$@!-ing Larry-and-the-airport.”) Sometimes they connote an epic standoff, though Larry-and-the-airport is, at its most basic, just a court case in which a ruling is expected any day now.

Larry is Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of Oracle Corp. and the nation’s second-richest person. The airport is little San Jose International, where Ellison keeps his Gulfstream V. And--for the benefit of those who may not have kept up with the past three years of mutual nose-thumbing--the former has taken the latter to federal court on a question that now threatens the sleep of some 10,000 airport neighbors: whether Ellison should be allowed to fly in and out of San Jose whenever he wants.

The larger issues are familiar to any metropolis where working stiffs cross paths with jet-setting moguls. In San Jose, however, that situation seems to have happened overnight. Take, for example, the local airport curfew, which was drawn up when San Jose was a much sleepier city. Intended to prevent most planes from taking off or landing between 11:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m., the 17-year-old curfew is unusual in that it is weight-based, covering aircraft weighing more than 75,000 pounds.

Ellison’s $38-million Gulfstream V weighs 90,500 pounds with its tank full. Once, that greater size might have meant a noisier plane. But because of aeronautical advances in the past two decades, the Gulfstream makes only a fraction of the noise made by older but lighter--and thus exempt--aircraft. Ellison has asked for an exemption, saying the noise ordinance discriminates against his quiet airplane. For a variety of reasons, however, the city has refused to accommodate the goateed billionaire and the jet with deep leather seats and bird’s-eye maple paneling.

One reason is political. Four years ago, as Silicon Valley boomed and demand for flights in and out of it burgeoned, San Jose’s curfew became key to a drive to expand the airport. The expansion, which is still wending its way through the regulatory gantlet, was approved by the city in 1997, but only after city officials vowed to more aggressively enforce the existing noise curbs.

Mayor Ron Gonzalez was elected on a campaign to crack down on airplane noise. And on June 25, 1998--shortly after Gonzalez took office--Ellison started flying in and out of San Jose after hours. No fines are attached to the curfew; the city had mainly dealt with violators by firing off letters and threatening to get court orders. Ellison and his corporation, Wing and a Prayer Inc., which is the plane’s owner, got seven letters from the airport in nine months.

Ellison ignored them. The city sent more letters. Down on the flight path, where civic boosters were scrambling to make San Jose synonymous with Silicon Valley, homeowners howled that the tech big shot was getting special treatment. The San Jose Mercury News egged things on, pointedly noting “San Jose’s reluctance to confront one of Silicon Valley’s richest men.”

“On Monday,” a Dec. 21, 1999 news story jeered, “city officials really let [Ellison] have it: They held a committee meeting.” The city, however, found that its options were limited.

For example, enforcement was tricky. A federal law passed in 1990 grandfathered existing local curfews (adopted before that date), and restricted cities from enacting new ones. San Jose’s curfew already was being challenged by small-plane owners and other aviation enthusiasts.

Nor could the city just wink at Ellison’s transgressions. Officials said that if they let Ellison’s jet fly late, they would have to do the same for commercial aircraft with similar noise levels. “One exception for one Gulfstream V would open the door for a couple dozen more flights a night,” said the mayor’s spokesman, David Vossbrink. Even quieter jets can be a nuisance when dozens are flying over a neighborhood at bedtime. Not even U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, when he was running for vice president, got a curfew exemption: When he stayed too late at a Silicon Valley fund-raiser, the airport told him to sleep over and fly out in the morning.

Some suggested changing the curfew ordinance, but federal law effectively prohibits amending the curfew without voiding it. Others pointed out that Ellison--whose jet is the only private plane of its size to be based at the San Jose airport--could have avoided the problem simply by using nearby airports in Oakland or San Francisco. But San Francisco is chronically fog-bound and Oakland is more than an hour by car from Silicon Valley. Plus, San Jose has the best corporate jet center and--well, simplicity is not part of the Ellison style. When Ellison strode to the podium at the last Comdex trade show, he was flanked by security guards, ZZ Top was blasting from the sound system and he was laughing with reporters about a wild Internet rumor that he had just died in a fiery plane crash in the parking lot at Oracle headquarters.

While the airport fight was building, Ellison was caught hiring a gumshoe to spy on a pro-Microsoft trade group; had a public falling out with his longtime corporate lieutenant; was sued (unsuccessfully) by a Florida yacht broker who claimed Ellison cheated him out of $700,000 in sales commissions; was accused of faking the smog certificate on his McLaren F1 sports car; and was contacted by police because his fired housekeeper had been caught pawning his stolen Rolex.

Ellison, in short, is not the sort to go gently. “It’s wacky,” he said of the curfew when a TV reporter corralled him at a software conference in late 1999 in San Francisco. “San Jose has no right to tell me when to land my airplane. [The airport] is federal property and it’s a federal issue.” The remarks created such a ruckus in San Jose that since then, Ellison has declined to comment on the airport. But 2 1/2 months later in January 2000--as the city continued to pelt him with warning letters--he called San Jose’s bluff and sued.

“He got tired of being called a scofflaw,” Ellison’s lawyer, Edward P. Davis Jr., said last week. “The city kept sending these notices and we kept explaining why we thought the G-five [jet] satisfied their requirements, and they kept rejecting our arguments and threatening to kick the airplane out of the hangar and calling press conferences to say bad things about Larry Ellison. We just decided to go to court and settle it once and for all.”

The mogul asked the court to enjoin the city from enforcing its curfew against his Gulfstream; the city has since asked that Ellison be enjoined from taking off and landing after hours. Now, after more than a year of argument, the matter rests before U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel, who warned the city last month that, if he were to end up making the call, the noise question will be left up to federal regulations, which are not weight-based and “it may be that the airport doesn’t have a curfew anymore.”

“I blame both sides,” fumed Kathleen Cahill, a 37-year-old teacher who lives near the airport in a bungalow “about the size of Larry Ellison’s bathroom.”

“Larry Ellison’s an immature ass who wants to have everything his way. But the city was stupid for making the rules the way they did.” Her consolation, she says, is that if the curfew goes, so might the popular support for San Jose’s airport expansion. Maybe then, she says, the city will snap out of its fixation with the civic big leagues.

“I’m sick of the city thinking of us always as Silicon Valley now, and never as just Santa Clara County,” she said, summing up the adjustment that, in so many ways, is what people here really mean when they talk about “Larry-and-the-airport.”

“I’m sick of it being that, if you’re not high-tech here, you basically don’t count.”