Airport struggling to stay under the cap

Alicia Robinson

It’s the nagging problem everyone’s talking about but no one seems to

know how to solve.

John Wayne Airport’s passenger levels have soared every month for

the last year as a result of increased capacity allowed by the

settlement agreement that governs airport operations. August was its

busiest month ever, with more than 872,000 people using the airport.

If the number of travelers using John Wayne continues to climb at

such rates, the airport will reach its cap of 10.3 million passengers

a year within the next two years, according to some airport

activists.

Several people are pursuing solutions to what they admit is a

regional problem, but some of them are flying under the radar for

now.

A GROWING DEMAND

The airport, owned by Orange County, operates under a settlement

agreement that caps the permitted number of flights and passengers

and sets a curfew on flights to limit noise in surrounding

residential areas. The agreement was renegotiated in 2003 to raise

the cap from 8.4 million to 10.3 million annual passengers through

2011. The cap then becomes 10.8 million passengers a year until 2015.

The number of passengers coming through John Wayne Airport has

been growing since October 2003, when airport officials doled out

added capacity from the new cap to airlines.

“We have been setting more-or-less records on a monthly basis

going back to late last year,” airport spokesman Justin McCusker

said. “When you’re seeing increased levels, it’s because the amended

settlement agreement allowed the cap to move up.”

Airport officials aren’t speculating when the cap will be reached

because it will depend on a number of issues, some of which are out

of the airport’s control, he said.

“Whether or not the capacity levels continue to increase is really

a product of the airlines,” he said. “It’s whether or not people are

flying.”

After this month, the airport will have baseline numbers to

compare passenger levels year to year under the 10.3-million cap.

REACHING THE CAP

The airport is likely to serve about 9.4 million passengers in

2004, and in 2005 officials will have to allocate passenger slots

carefully to avoid bumping against the cap, Airport Working Group

spokesman Tom Naughton said. The Airport Working Group was a party to

the settlement agreements that govern the airport. The others are the

city of Newport Beach, the county, the environmental group Stop

Polluting Our Newport and the Federal Aviation Administration.

If the airport were to reach the cap before the end of a given

year, it would have to be shut down until the year’s end, Naughton

said.

The dangers attending a limited supply are that travelers could

see ticket prices increase with demand, and they may not be able to

fly when they want to, Naughton said.

“You might call and say, ‘I’d like a flight on Monday,’ and they’d

say, ‘Sorry, we’re all out of seats. How about Tuesday?’” he said.

“You start to inconvenience the flying public.”

Aside from the settlement agreement, John Wayne Airport has

limited space to grow. Ongoing expansion to accommodate the higher

cap -- eight new security checkpoints opened in July, and longer-term

plans are in place to expand terminal space -- will nearly fill up

the land the airport has available, Naughton said.

People are depending heavily on Los Angeles International Airport

to handle the burden of increasing passenger loads bound for Orange

County, and other solutions haven’t gotten off the ground, he said.

“There’s a lot of plans and a lot of money being spent on plans,

but I don’t see anything happening,” he said.

WHERE TO GO NEXT

Solutions will be a long time coming, but officials and airport

activists are working toward them, both behind the scenes and out in

the open.

In the next few weeks, Newport Beach city officials will begin

discussions with Orange County supervisors about four issues over

which the city would like to have more control. One of those issues

is John Wayne Airport.

The possibility of more city involvement in the airport and in

other areas of county jurisdiction has been discussed over the last

year, but not much progress was made, City Manager Homer Bludau said.

“John Wayne Airport certainly isn’t in our jurisdiction, but it

affects us very much, and we want to talk,” he said. “Now we just

need to find out whether [the supervisors] are interested enough when

they hear some of the detail [on all four issues] to progress into

serious talks.”

Bludau said it will be several months before he can provide

details on what the city is proposing, but keeping a tight hold on

airport passenger levels will be a top priority for the city for at

least the next decade.

“I don’t think anybody wants to see the cap increase,” he said.

“The City Council didn’t want to see the cap increase with the last

agreement.”

Hoping to address the transportation problem regionally, Los

Angeles City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski is pushing a plan to

manage traffic at LAX that could include creating a regional airport

authority, a body that would essentially force Southern California

officials to come to the table and talk airports.

“The councilwoman recognized that we do need to have some sort of

a regional solution,” said David Kissinger, who is Miscikowski’s

airport-relations deputy. “Typically, state legislation would enable

a regional authority that would require the local agencies to sit

down and be a part of this regional authority.”

A regional authority theoretically would have the power, for

example, to resurrect the proposal for a commercial airport at the

closed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, an option Orange County

voters nixed in 2002 when they voted to rezone the land as a park.

Some Newport-Mesa activists have tenaciously held on to the El Toro

airport idea.

“I don’t see it as likely,” Kissinger said. “My own personal view

is that, today, if you wanted El Toro to happen, you would need

federal intervention.”

Hearings on Miscikowski’s LAX plan are set to begin this week, and

a state bill proposing the regional airport authority could happen

later this year, Kissinger said.

Possibly the most novel proposal to relieve passenger overload at

John Wayne came from longtime airport activist and retired aviation

engineer Charles Griffin.

Griffin, one of nine Newport residents to have applied for a

council seat vacated by Gary Adams this summer, said recently that he

plans to travel to France later this month to suggest that plane

manufacturer Airbus buy El Toro when it’s auctioned off this fall and

use it to accommodate the new, larger passenger plane the company is

developing.

The new plane is too big to use at most conventional airport gates

and terminals, he said.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She may be reached at (949) 764-4330 or by e-mail at

[email protected].