Published with the permission of the OC Weekly
March 7-13, 1997

Poetic airport irony in the battle over El Toro
It’s ironic that the county never mentions commercial-airline pilots when it talks of how wonderful the El Toro International Airport will be. Ironic, but understandable, according to two pilots who’ve studied the plans of the place they’ll have to fly into and out of. They’ve discovered the county couldn’t have picked a worse place to carry out 447,000 landings and takeoffs a year.

As the pilots see it, there are two critical problems: terrain and airspace. On the first, Captain Charles Quilter--a Laguna Beach resident and pilot with a major airline--is a clear authority, having flown fighter jets out of El Toro in the 1960s. His concerns are considerable, revolving around the big mountains that lie at the ends of two of El Toro’s runways.

Quilter, who insists that county plans to have 70 percent of planes take off to the east are “pure fiction,” says that pilots will demand departing to the north--away from the steeply rising terrain that plagues the runways heading east. “But that will take planes over cities [in North County] that otherwise wouldn’t be affected.” Using a graph of airplane performance provided by Quilter, the Weekly calculated that planes taking off to the north from El Toro will fly just 1,700 feet over Tustin, 3,000 feet over Orange and 5,700 feet over Fullerton. According to Quilter, planes under 6,000 feet cause considerable noise and pollution.

But Todd Thornton, another airline pilot from Laguna, isn’t so sure North County cities would see any fly-overs. Thornton spoke at length with air-traffic controllers at Miramar Naval Air Station, which monitors Southern California’s airspace. His conclusion: flights from El Toro over northern O.C. cities will conflict with so-called “approach corridors” into Los Angeles International Airport. In other words, planes taking off from El Toro would fly directly into planes trying to land at LAX.

“For that reason,” said Thornton, “I see all planes departing [to the north] and turning left right after takeoff and heading out to sea.” That would take the planes directly over--drum roll, please--Newport Beach and Corona del Mar. Residents there, who have consistently backed an airport at El Toro, would reap the whirlwind: 26 overflights an hour at roughly 3,000 feet. And that’s in addition to planes from nearby John Wayne, also 3,000 feet above the Gold Coast.

--Anthony Pignataro

Click here for two more airline pilots' statements on the El Toro flight paths.