Dark Skies Ahead for Aviation in Orange County?

Gen. Bloomer proposed a rational, if not, alas, presently politically practical, solution to the dilemma of a burgeoning John Wayne Airport, after he presented a chilling assessment of the perils of Orange County’s overcrowded skies.

Brig. Gen. W. A. Bloomer, commander of Marine Corps Air Bases West, had asked the question, “Are we crowding ourselves out of the El Toro skies?” as the title of his talk last Wednesday before the University Forum at UC Irvine’s University Club. His emphatic answer was, “Yes!”

Although Gen. Bloomer’s targeted concern was with air traffic congestion and the accident potential in the skies and on the ground surrounding El Toro Marine base, his overall worry was the entire sky canopy of Orange County. Growing congestion of both sky and terrain were treated as a packaged overview by the general, which brings me to his solution.

Stressing that this was his personal opinion, he said that limitation of population growth, even a moratorium on the county’s growth and development, was necessary to relieve overcrowded skies. More residential development means more people wanting to fly, he said.

Gen. Bloomer reiterated his and the Marine Corps’ determination to remain at El Toro and to reject joint civilian-military use of the base to relieve congestion at John Wayne Airport. He said that Camp Pendleton was unsuitable as a Marine air base, as the field was in a valley that severely limited take-off and landing patterns of the great C-5 marine carriers. Besides, the bulk of the base was used for bombing practice, an activity incompatible with an airport.

Questions from the audience disclosed that the Orange County Board of Supervisor’s would like to see the Marines vacate El Toro, thus taking the pressure off John Wayne Airport. If successful, mused Gen. Bloomer, this would merely serve to increase commercial and general aviation flights to fill the void, creating an equallyuntenable situation, if not worse, in the skies.

He warned that coast air traffic controllers rapidly are approaching the saturation point when they will lose control of sky traffic.

General aviation flying is a major safety threat, particularly out of John Wayne Airport, where there are 450,000 operations (take offs and landings) annually, 90% of which are general aviation planes, not commercial airlines, he said. A problem to air safety of these kinds of flights is that pilots, on clear days, like to use the coastline or Interstate 5 as orientation features. They usually fly low.

This is dangerous for Marine planes at El Toro and Marine helicopters at the Tustin base on Redhill Avenue. Many near-misses are reported weekly. Northerly-southerly flight patterns from John Wayne of all planes, general and commercial, pose hourly accident potentials. There is particular danger of collisions along the northerly pattern that generally parallels Redhill Avenue, he said.

Northerly-southerly and easterly-westerly flight patterns from runways at El Toro are being boxed in by developments, he said. A potentially hazardous development is the UCI Medical Center, which could break ground in July, in close proximity to the easterly-westerly runway, he declared. He urged the citizens of Irvine to halt construction.

The general’s chilling overview, coupled with his belief that we, all of us, the whole county, military and civilian, are in this together struck home to me. The immutable laws of probability, given sufficient encouragement--and we’re surely doing that with premeditated, unrestrained growth of populations and air traffic--will guarantee that the potential numbers of air and ground accidents will increase dramatically. In this context, growth limitation makes solid good sense to me.