A union official for the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn. Orange County officials and consultants say the new flights can be managed safely and that delays would be insignificant. About one-third of the flights would leave to the north, with the rest taking off to the east, planners said. The county hopes to open the airport in 2005, though the project has been hit with a series of delays. Concerns over the complexity of Southern California airspace escalated in 1986, when 81 people were killed in the collision of a private plane and an airliner bound for LAX over Cerritos.
Pilots regard Southern California as the nation's second most complex airspace.
In October, Kuykendall and 16 other members of California's congressional delegation wrote Garvey, urging that Southern California be given priority in the airspace study. Other voices this week joined in the warnings raised about the planned El Toro airport. Don Segner, who served as the third-ranking FAA official in Washington from 1981 to 1986, said the only way the new airport could be made acceptably safe is to close John Wayne and change the orientation of El Toro's runways so planes wouldn't depart or land over nearby mountains. I hope that the FAA will do the right thing. Within the industry, safety is an absolute.