State’s Airports Cautiously Open for Business

The first plane to arrive at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday was accompanied by tears. The first to leave California jetted off to applause.

And so the state’s network of airports creaked slowly back to life two days after terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon brought a nation and an industry to a standstill.

Private cars were banned from LAX. Security guards checked the engine compartments of vehicles arriving at John Wayne Airport in Orange County. Fingernail clippers and a sewing kit set off sophisticated search equipment at San Francisco International Airport.

But those lucky--and brave--enough to fly anywhere Thursday embraced precautions they would have railed against just three days ago; inconvenience had morphed suddenly into safety. All that mattered was a chance to be on the move again, for most people, in the direction of home.

“I’m so happy to be back,” said Alicia Kistler of Riverside, her eyes welling with tears as she filed off of Alitalia Airlines Flight 622--usually Milan to Los Angeles, this week via Calgary. Hers was the first commercial flight to land in Los Angeles on Thursday. It had been diverted to Canada when the hijackings began.

Kistler and her fellow waylaid travelers were back on U.S. soil, and it sure felt good. Shouted one woman, as she passed a bank of reporters outside the Tom Bradley Terminal: “I think I’m going to kiss the ground.”

The Alitalia flight arrived at 10:30 a.m. Shortly afterward, a color guard marched through the Bradley terminal. Around noon, a phoned-in bomb threat briefly emptied the terminal between flights. “I’m sure this is just the first of many we’ll have today,” said a uniformed INS worker.

But the airport didn’t spring to life until around 1 p.m., when the first flights were scheduled to depart. Lines at ticket counters snaked out the doors as anxious passengers arrived in shuttle buses, vans and taxis. Just waiting for a shuttle delighted Ben Parry of Lake Elsinore. “There was a huge crowd at the parking lot. We’re just happy to be here,” he said.

At San Francisco International Airport, long waits and repeated cancellations only made an awful week worse for many. Rhonda Dennison’s son-in-law is missing in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and all she wanted was a chance to join her grieving daughter in New York. She had been booked on four different flights--all canceled. Thursday afternoon she waited tearfully for a stand-by seat.

James Gale, 51, spent the time waiting for his flight to John F. Kennedy Airport trying to figure out how to explain what had happened to his children. Friends back home in New York are missing. His child’s hockey rink has been transformed into a morgue. “It’s a paranoid situation,” he said.

A bomb threat briefly cleared one domestic terminal in San Francisco, but at least the heightened security seemed to work, as Hal Yarbrough found out the hard way.

Yarbrough was trying to get home to Connecticut. The best he could do was an American Airlines flight to Boston. Security guards twice became alarmed by the 3-inch scissors in his sewing kit before they finally gave him an ultimatum: Check them or lose them. He lost them. Happily.

“Believe me,” said the 42-year-old executive with the Lego toy company, “I have no problems with this.”

Nobody did. Joe Wilson of Fresno was forced to stow his needle-nose pliers in his checked baggage at LAX. “This just shows you they are serious,” he said. “You are not going to be able to do things you used to do.”

Burbank Airport opened at 11:30 a.m., but only one passenger flight departed, and only one was expected to land.

Orange County’s John Wayne Airport, cozy with only 14 gates, opened at 10 a.m. Thursday, before Los Angeles, Ontario or San Francisco airports. Spokeswoman Yolanda Perez speculated that its small size was easier for the FAA to inspect--a condition for reopening.

John Wayne normally handles nearly 300 flights a day. On Thursday, only three landed. Only eight left. And airport officials described themselves as “elated.”

The American Airlines ticket counter held a large bouquet topped with an American flag. America West workers planned to go their competition one better by escorting the scheduled 1:07 p.m. flight with a parade of workers carrying a giant American flag.

Bob and Jan Robitaille and their daughter, Allie, 9, were supposed to fly out at noon Tuesday to return home to Olathe, Kan. They were trying to wrap up a four-day mini-vacation built around the Kansas State-USC football game when their flight was canceled.

“Had we been in the air, who knows where we would be now?” said Jan Robitaille, 46. “Who knows what would have happened to us? It was divine intervention. The Lord protected us.”

An Atlanta-bound Delta airliner--half empty--left John Wayne shortly after noon, as airport workers waved from the taxiway at the first plane to leave California soil since Tuesday.

Its engines echoed eerily in the normally bustling runway area. Inside the plane was just as quiet. Silent passengers paid rapt attention to the normally ignored safety video. A round of turbulence got no response.

Burly Delta employees traveling along were anything but chatty. Said one: “If you want any comment you’ll have to call the FBI.”

But after all of the pain and all of the fear, all of the trauma and all of the waiting, for many passengers it was simply a relief to be en route anywhere.

“I feel fine,” said Jim Williams from Maysville, Ky., as he rummaged through a Mickey Mouse tote bad. “We were ready to go. Statistically, this is still the safest way to travel.”

Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga, Joseph Menn, Soraya Nelson, Cara Mia DiMassa, Kimi Yoshimo, Scott Martelle and Janet Wilson contributed to this story.