Club Hopes to Keep El Toro Home

Members of the Orange County Modelers Assn. look at the miles of vacant airport runways -- far from any homeowner with the potential to complain about their radio-controlled miniature aircraft -- and they see paradise.

“This is about as good as they come,” said Wade Kloos, president of the group, as he surveyed the open space at the former El Toro Marine base.

The hobbyists are still a little bitter about being kicked out of Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley two years ago to make way for another golf course, but they admit it turned out to be a blessing because it prompted the move to El Toro.

Though their tenure there too could end once the 4,700 acres of base property are parceled off to developers for thousands of homes, and for commercial and recreational uses.

In Orange County, the days of model-aircraft pilots having their pick of open fields and few neighbors are gone, and their search for suitable land is becoming increasingly difficult.

In 25 years at Mile Square there were few complaints, but there had been some grumbling from residents who objected to the noise and worried about the miniature aircraft crashing into homes and yards where children were playing.

Though many of the planes are small and light, some have wingspans of more than six feet and weigh more than 50 pounds. Those with turbine engines can reach speeds of 200 mph.

“It’s going to be increasingly hard to find those type of places” to suit the modelers, said Marlon Boarnet, professor of planning, policy and design at UC Irvine. “Orange County has been changing from a rural, agricultural area to an urban area, and that’s something that’s been going on for decades.”

If they are bounced out of El Toro, Kloos said, their only option in Orange County is a small, private field in Trabuco Canyon that’s surrounded by rocky terrain inhospitable to the planes, some of which are worth more than $10,000.

The models include intricately scaled versions of World War II-era fighters and bombers, biplanes from the early days of aviation and modern jets.

“I look at L.A. and there are four county parks that provide space” for radio-controlled planes, said hobbyist Gerry Reid.

“Orange County provides nothing. They took away the only [park] we had.”

Members could take their planes to Whittier Narrows field in Whittier, but they typically like to fly early in the morning, and the rush-hour commute makes it difficult to get there.

Plus, said Reid, “you’re flying [near] a freeway on one end and a gun range on the other.”

There are about 250 members of the association who pay $100 every six months for access to the El Toro site.

They can fly their planes seven days a week from dusk to dawn.

Kloos said he hoped the city allows the modelers to maintain some portion of the former airfield.

Ideally, he said, the city would set aside enough space for a “hobby village” for model airplanes, helicopters, model rockets, remote-controlled cars and boats.

There would be a central facility for concessions and equipment, and classes on how to build and fly a plane, he said.

That’s much like what they had at Mile Square before the county evicted them, he said.

“The county was very supportive of a model community,” Kloos said, until it determined that the prime real estate could generate more revenue than the hobbyists could provide.

Richard Huffnagle, supervising park ranger at Mile Square, was one of their biggest fans. He opposed evicting the hobbyists and criticized the county for putting profit over recreation.

“My personal feeling is we don’t build parks to generate revenue,” Huffnagle said. “We build parks for people to recreate in. We had model cars, land sailors. It was a multipurpose hobby area. There was no other place like it.”

Hobbyists also had silenced the few critics who complained about the noise by putting mufflers on the engines, starting later in the day and using decibel monitors.

Kloos said he was aware of the uphill battle the association had in duplicating the Mile Square hobby area at El Toro.

Dan Jung, Irvine’s director of strategic programs, said the modelers competed for recreation space with more than a dozen other applicants.

“One of the issues is, it does take a great deal of space” to accommodate the model planes, Jung said.

Planners anticipate roughly 3,400 homes on the former Marine base, Jung said.

Other base land will be devoted to education, agriculture and recreation.

But the model hobbyists are not yet out of the running, said Chris Mears, chairman of the board of the Great Park Corp., which is planning the uses of the land.

“This is a piece of land that’s seven square miles,” Mears said. “If among the preferred uses identified by the residents of the county is a hobby village or some version of that ... it obviously improves the chances of this kind of use being realized.”