Safe but Oh! Slow
SO MUCH FOR EL TORO BEING UNSAFE FOR COMMERCIAL JETS. The Federal Aviation Administration hopefully has dispelled that myth once and for all with the release last week of its report concluding the county’s proposed airport “can be conducted in a safe manner” and “can meet the minimum FAA airport design standards.”
In other words, El Toro’s safe to fly.
You’d think the anti-airport forces, who have used false statements, zoom-lens photos and twisted facts to argue otherwise, would have been chagrined at this official repudiation of their assertions.
But guess again. Without missing a beat, the El Toro No brigade simply found a new line of attack: El Toro, as envisioned by the county and cleared by the FAA report, is a crummy airport.
“The county’s been promising a hare, but it’s getting a tortoise,” anti-airport supe Todd Spitzer charged. “It gets you there, but it’s slow, inefficient and it delays air traffic in the entire Southern California region.”
Gee, Todd, didn’t know you cared. One remedy, of course, would be to turn this airport into a hare. Fly the planes west over Irvine. Or have them take off to the south, over the million-dollar homes The Irvine Company is putting in at Shady Canyon. The former route has been proposed by the pilots union. The latter was suggested by FAA regional administrator William Withycombe; Whithycombe, it should be noted, did sign the FAA’s report on El Toro, but he also opined to the Register that there were better ways, from an aviation standpoint, to land and take off at El Toro.
Agreed. But the problem with optimizing takeoff and landing procedures at El Toro is, of course, political. They just won’t fly. I know of nobody, in fact, including ardent airport proponents such as myself, who supports departures over Irvine.
So the “tortoise” of an airport we have on the table is a direct result of accommodating the communities and other interests whose representatives, such as Spitzer, now attack it for being a pokey little thing.
The county envisions an El Toro airport of about 19 million passengers a year (compared with John Wayne’s 7 to 8 million and LAX’s 67 million), and with takeoff and landing patterns that, the FAA concludes, will cause some conflicts with existing flight patterns of regional airports. The FAA report projects frequent El Toro flight delays, some of up to an hour. Not a pretty picture. But let’s take a closer look at the situation.
Maddening as the FAA report makes it sound, El Toro really would be just another inconvenient airport. Some airports already routinely encounter delays on the magnitude of those projected by the FAA for El Toro. Moreover, El Toro proponents note that the FAA scenario does not take into account the ability of airlines schedulers to work around traffic conflicts in order to reduce delays. Also, it’s been suggested the FAA could eliminate most of the anticipated El Toro delays by simply moving John Wayne approach lanes away from El Toro, to where they were before the Marines left El Toro.
And there’s more: The county contends that the model the FAA used to determine El Toro’s impact on the current traffic patterns was less comprehensive than the model commissioned by the county in its environmental impact report. That model, based on the county’s original 2020 projections, assumed 28 million passengers a year at El Toro and a reduced 5.5 million passengers at John Wayne. It concluded that the average departure would be delayed by 2.4 minutes at El Toro (and by 2.5 at JWA). The FAA considers a five-minute average to be congestion; in its latest annual report the agency found almost all large hubs to have departure delays of more than three minutes, with LAX and San Francisco at about five and LaGuardia and Newark, the highest, at about 13 minutes.
One more thing: Many planners expect an eventual overhaul of the entire air traffic system in the region. Certainly problems with El Toro could be resolved at that time.
Last week’s El Toro report was released as Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn came out against any further expansion of LAX and called on Ontario, El Toro and John Wayne to help meet future demand. And the report followed a study by pro-El Toro forces that persuasively argues the proposed Great Park at El Toro would be a billion-dollar taxpayer boondoggle.
And all of this is occurring amid the uncertainties of Sept. 11. I’ve heard arguments every which way (and made a few myself) of how terrorism will affect the plans for El Toro. At this point, it’s probably anyone’s guess.
As the El Toro debate goes, though, I think the FAA report and the reaction to it constitutes progress.
We can now agree that safety isn’t the issue. We can also agree that the county’s proposed airport is less than optimal.
Will minds be changed? I don’t know. But I think county airport planner Bryan Speegle sums up the situation well: “We aren’t planning the optimal airport. We’re planning an airport that balances operating efficiency against the environmental and community impacts.”
