In Southern California, the busiest air space in the world, there are plans for new runways and new airports to bring a more regional approach to aviation. There is even talk of a high-speed rail system to shuttle passengers to and from the San Francisco area.
Opponents of the projects, searching for allies in the courts and on the airwaves, put up a roadblock in a ballot initiative last month that requires two-thirds of the vote of a county’s population for any airport, landfill or jail to be built.
Los Angeles World Airports, the government agency that runs Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and three other airports, plans a $10 billion to $12 billion expansion of LAX to meet forecasted demand that could see the number of passengers climb to 98 million from 61 million by 2015.
Except for the money involved and the scale, it is just like Boston’s Logan International Airport, which plans to spend more than $3 billion to add terminal space, build a new runway and improve regional distribution of flights by drumming up business for Worcester. And Amtrak is working on high-speed service between New York and Boston to cut down on shuttle flights.
“Our discussions could be the same, with the only difference being the names,” said Mike Gordon, mayor of El Segundo, a city of about 16,000 abutting LAX.
The airports in Boston and Los Angeles are just two of more than a dozen airports around the country–from Miami to Seattle, Detroit to Dallas–planning or constructing runways and multibillion-dollar improvements. The goals are to reduce delays–as is the case in Boston and San Francisco, where there is talk of filling in two square miles of bay for a runway–to handle increasing demand for capacity, or both.
Last month, Congress hammered out an agreement to fund the Federal Aviation Administration and airport improvements by raising the ticket surcharge on each passenger. Under the deal between the House and Senate, the so-called passenger facility charges will rise to $4.50 per one-way flight from $3, which will bring in another $1.4 billion a year. The Massachusetts Port Authority, which owns and operates Logan, has not decided whether to raise its user fees, but officials believe it could bring in another $18 million a year.
A smoothly operating national aviation system is critical to the country’s economic well-being. The most recent forecast indicates annual passenger counts to approach 1 billion in 2010, from more than 600 million now.
Modernizing airport terminals and airfields is the mantra of politicians and industry officials around the country. Airports pump billions of dollars into local economies, and decisions on whether to expand an airport are made, for the most part, locally.
“Modernizing LAX is the only answer,” said Ezunial Burts, president of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce. “We weren’t drumming up business, but this is the gateway to the Pacific. And if nothing is done it will mean longer lines and delay.”
“All of the battles are fought in isolation,” says Dennis McGrann, executive director of Washington-based NOISE, the national organization to ensure a sound-controlled environment. “The fights are absent a national debate.”
Indeed, sometimes it is hard to even come to a regional consensus, let alone a national one.
While Gordon has sued LAX for making piecemeal improvements to an airport that he believes should have undergone environmental review, the dispute over airport expansion is even more bitter in neighboring Orange County, where most county supervisors want to turn El Toro, a 4,700-acre former Marine Corps Air Station, into a commercial international airport. They are doing so in the face of significant community opposition.
But hoping for a national solution is a pipe dream.
“We can’t get people to look at this regionally,” said Susan Withrow, a Mission Viejo city councilor and El Toro opponent.
Even officials at the Airports Council International, a trade association, think there should be more national coordination.
“The Federal Aviation Administration should not take legal responsibility, but it could do a better job coordinating and looking at national needs,” said Richard Marchi, a spokesman.
“Ideally, from a national standpoint, it would be great if the federal government could dictate where we will have airport expansion and where we won’t,” said Paul Galis, the FAA’s deputy associate administrator for airports. “But we can’t. The underlying premise is that airports are local matters, controlled by local agencies. We are obliged to respond to local initiatives.”
The FAA’s national airport plan is not so much a blueprint for where development should occur to best meet demand, but an inventory of development plans that are brought to the agency by local governments. The agency’s mandate from Congress, said Galis, is to support new projects if they make economic sense.
In Orange County, the effort is decidedly local, and it makes the controversy over Logan’s proposed runway look sedate.
Opponents air ads on cable television showing body bags from a 1965 Marine crash into a mountainside that killed 84 servicemen and crew members headed to Vietnam.
“When a highway is built, at least they pay you for your property, but here there will be 747s flying over our houses,” said John Steward, pastor of the Mount of Olives Lutheran Church in Mission Viejo. “To love your neighbor as yourself is the basis of moral judgment, and if someone lived elsewhere they would not want it to happen to them.”
Officials pushing the airport conversion say it is needed to preserve the economic good times in Orange County, maintain the area’s competitiveness in a global economy and generate jobs.
But numerous safety questions have been raised about the project, and the Air Line Pilots Association vehemently opposes a commercial airfield there.
“Poor planning, poor design and less than desirable topography will haunt this airport indefinitely,” said Capt. John Russell, ALPA’s regional safety chief, in a Feb. 16 letter to county officials. “El Toro has very few redeeming qualities if any at all. Put another way, El Toro is the antithesis of what one would expect from a state-of-the-art facility.”
Among the problems, John Wayne Airport is but seven miles away, and the draft environmental report prepared by the county said takeoffs from El Toro would be with a tail wind into rising terrain, a dangerous scenario.
That point was drilled home to a group of senior citizens meeting at the Orange Senior Center, by former Marine Col. Thomas F. O’Malley Jr. O’Malley flew KC-130 refueling aircraft out of the base, and now is working with the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority, an agency with a $6 million budget that is trying to turn the base into mixed residential and commercial land with open space.
“No one in this room loves to fly more than I do,” he told the 25 members of the local chapter of the AARP. “And while it was safe for the Marines to fly out of, it is not safe for the airlines. I’m not telling you scare tactics. The fact is there is no place more unsafe than an airport surrounded on three sides by mountains.”
And because John Wayne Airport, also in Orange County but limited in its ability to grow, is so close, traffic between the two airports will have to be sequenced.
“Fairy dust and a magic wand will not cure the air traffic control issues plaguing El Toro,” Russell wrote in his letter.
But no El Toro would exacerbate demand at crowded LAX.
The airport had its last major modernization for the 1984 Olympics, when 30 million passengers went through the facility.
The Southern California Association of Governments has estimated that about 160 million passengers will use the region’s major airports by 2020, with about 29 million using Orange County airports, John Wayne or El Toro, and about 98 million using LAX.
But opposition to a fifth runway at LAX prompted Mayor Richard Riordan last summer to put forward a proposal with no new runway, but new terminals. The plan included more than $3 billion in ground transportation improvements, including an airport ring road, a connection to the interstate system and an extension of a rapid transit line to the airport.
That plan, which anticipates a major airport at El Toro, would limit LAX growth to about 89 million passengers and aircraft operations would increase by 5 percent instead of 25 percent with a new runway. To handle that, LAX may have to reduce the commuter flights, which account for about one-third of its operations but only 6 percent of the passenger count, airport officials said.
To reduce congestion at LAX, the airport hopes to award a design contract for an offsite terminal at a park-and-ride lot in Van Nuys used by 700,000 passengers a year who are bused to the airport. Passengers would check their baggage at Van Nuys, receive a boarding pass and proceed to their gates.
Logan, which has similar buses from suburban locations, has no immediate plans to check bus passengers’ bags at remote locations, but ticketing is available.
As delays grow and cost America billions in productivity, the FAA is working to improve air-traffic control with such technology as global positioning systems.
At San Francisco, where low visibility reduces airport capacity to one runway instead of two, one plan is to move a runway into the bay to increase separation and thus permit simultaneous landings in bad weather.
However, United Airlines and the airport are looking at technology in the cockpit to increase pilot awareness of other planes in the area. That could improve the delays at San Francisco when the cloud ceiling drops, said Marchi.
“The thing that I find telling in all this,” said Marchi, “is that it is the airports and carriers trying to develop new procedures. The FAA is more reactive. They will approve things, but they are not taking the lead in Boston and elsewhere saying, `What can we do to increase capacity?’ “
UP IN THE AIR
Here’s what select cities are proposing to ease airport congestion and delays:
– Boston: Wants to build a 5,000-foot commuter runway, with planes taking off and landing over the water. Would require no taking of property.
– Los Angeles: Has several expansion proposals, including three that would build a fifth runway. One proposal does not call for building an additional runway, but lengthens an existing one and adds taxiways. Project involves buyout of some residential and commercial property.
– San Francisco: Proposal in early stages to build a fifth runway, out into San Francisco Bay. Designs include floating structure, filling the bay or building on concrete pilings.
– Miami: Is planning to build a new fourth runway as part of a $5.4 billion expansion. Officials say it will increase airport capacity by 22 percent.
– Seattle: FAA has approved a third runway, and the $773 million project is expected to be done by 2006. Project requires the taking of homes.
— Boston Globe
