County Air Traffic in Full Flight Again

Nearly three weeks after terrorists attacked America with its own airplanes, Ventura County’s three airports have shifted from blackout to slowdown and are now virtually back to normal--yet still nervous about the future.

After ending commercial flights for three days and grounding most small planes for 10, federal officials allowed local airport operations to fully resume Friday after lifting sporadic stops on crop-dusting, a prohibition on blimps and a ban on TV helicopters and planes pulling advertising banners.

“We’re nearly back to normal,” said Todd McNamee, deputy director of the county Department of Airports.

At tiny Santa Paula Airport, a squadron of private pilots was back in the sky. At Camarillo Airport, the county’s biggest and busiest, the flight schools hummed and the corporate jets returned. And at Oxnard Airport, customers lined up for the county’s only airline service in numbers similar to those before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I feel safer right now than before,” said Chris Hastert, manager of Oxnard Airport, as passengers prepared to board a United Express shuttle to Los Angeles. “It’s like if you’re going swimming in the ocean, and you watched ‘Jaws’ the night before, you might be more nervous but you’d also be more cautious.”

Security was tighter at Oxnard Airport, with an extra guard checking floors, counter tops and bathrooms for stray bags.

“I’m just going to grit my teeth and go,” said passenger Alta Reese, 75, of Ventura. “My flight was scheduled before the fiasco a couple of weeks ago. So I just cooled it until I saw what was going to happen. I still wouldn’t go now, except there are people in Portland relying on me for help.”

Reese was careful not to pack anything sharp or suspicious.

“They advised us about what not to have in our bags, like nail clippers,” said another passenger, Christa Anderson, 63. “But I’m not nervous. If it’s my time, then it’s my time.”

Attendants’ mental alarms went off while checking the luggage of Brian Ramsey, 36, an electrical engineer who works for the Navy at the Port Hueneme base.

“They actually scanned my check-in baggage,” Ramsey said. “And they had me open it up to examine my electric razor.”

That early morning Thursday shuttle flight was eventually canceled because of fog. But even that didn’t appear to try the patience of passengers who suddenly seem more forgiving of delays.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Sue Bourcq, 55, visiting from New Orleans. “At least we’re alive.”

When the fog finally lifted, Tyler Martin, 20, from Mechanicsburg, Ohio, arrived on another shuttle. He was reporting for training as a construction mechanic at the Port Hueneme Seabee base.

Martin and his Navy traveling partner, Josh Calendine, 18, wore dress-white uniforms, a violation in policy before Sept. 11, when everything suddenly changed.

“They were worried we could be singled out [by terrorists],” Martin said. But since the attacks, military superiors have decided that sailors in uniform will show that things are back to normal, calming other passengers.

In the days since the attacks in New York and near Washington, the small Santa Paula Airport flying community has rolled with a stiff economic punch while swapping stories about how fliers were caught in distant locales as the terrorists turned jetliners into megaton bombs.

Pilots Bruce and Barbara Anspaugh, for example, were stranded in Sturgis, S.D., and after a week they finally rented a car and drove home.

Pilot Dennis Reid was grounded at Pine Mountain Lake near Yosemite for 10 days. “I just water-skied every day,” he said.

But the oft-told story around hangars at the 32-acre, 71-year-old community airport is that of young Mike Harding, who was caught in the skies above Grand Junction, Colo., when the World Trade Center was attacked.

Harding, a senior at UC Santa Barbara, was ferrying a newly sold plane from Santa Paula to New York when the Grand Junction tower told him to land because of a national emergency. He questioned the ground crew a few minutes later and was told, “World War III just started.”

Harding tried to book a ticket home on a sold-out Amtrak train that eventually crashed and caught fire in the Utah desert. Then he tried to rent a car but failed. Finally, he rented a large Ryder truck, fighting the buffeting desert winds all the way.

“I’ll remember it all, I guess,” Harding said. “But what happened to me was nothing. I was happy just to take it in stride.”

Less fortunate were the eight or 10 small businesses that employ about 50 workers at Santa Paula Airport. With the airport essentially closed for 10 days, they lost significant money.

“It was dead as smelt--totally grounded,” said pilot John Lynch, 51. “It was very clear that if you got yourself airborne, you were going to get intercepted. We know some crop-dusters in the [San Joaquin] Valley, and that happened to them.”

Judy Phelps, co-owner of CP Aviation, a flight-training business, said she lost several thousand dollars in canceled lessons that idled six instructors.

“We’re kinda, sorta, back up to normal,” she said. “But we lost momentum. And it was depressing. It was beautiful clear weather, and our 10 planes were just sitting out there.”

Rowena Mason, president of the Santa Paula Airport Assn., said, “Everybody is just happy to be back in the air.”

Federal officials allowed Mason’s banner-towing business to reopen Friday. It had been grounded because banners pulled by planes usually are flown above open-air events such as ballgames, and that sort of traffic is still prohibited.

“We’re back in business,” Mason said. “But we lost $2,500 in scheduled work and who knows how much from the calls we’ve turned away.”

David Crest, who commutes by plane between homes in Pomona and Santa Paula, Thursday took his first flight “since the big event.” He said the experience was different from usual, since there was a lot more communication with ground flight controllers.

“It seems they’re keeping track of you a little closer,” he said. “And it seems everyone is very cooperative, even nicer than usual. Everyone’s still a little on edge. But the news really is kind of boring right now, and I just hope it stays that way.”

By the end of the week, Camarillo’s airport, which is twice as busy as Oxnard’s and four times as busy as Santa Paula’s, was bustling with hundreds of flights a day.

Helicopters thump-thumped through pilot training runs, and plane owners pulled in from other states so their craft could be serviced at the large maintenance facilities at the Camarillo field.

And, in a twist that reflects the continuing crackdown on small-plane flights near 30 large airports nationwide, fliers were temporarily moving their planes from general aviation airports in the Los Angeles Basin to Camarillo.

Under a temporary order, small planes without sophisticated instrumentation, or whose pilots are not qualified to fly with such instruments, are grounded at airports in Santa Monica, Torrance, Hawthorne, Long Beach, Compton and Fullerton, officials said.

“I’ve got two planes a flight instructor flew from Santa Monica Airport,” said Ed Berlin, standing near his parked planes in Camarillo. “I’m moving one here and one to Santa Ynez. To use them, I’ll have to drive up here.”

But by and large, it was business as usual at the airport’s Waypoint Cafe.

“Everybody is back up and flying, and the students are back,” said restaurant manager Sondra Phelps. “But I think they’re still a little nervous about what’s going to happen next.”

Not Walter Adair, the former Santa Paula police chief who now runs the Avex aircraft sales and maintenance facility at the airport. Adair has flown across the U.S. twice in the last two weeks, and he said the nation is on alert and on its best behavior in the air.

“Airway traffic is probably 80% of what it was,” Adair said. “And while sometimes you could hear tensions between controllers and pilots, you don’t hear that now. It’s like a courteousness-is-contagious type of thing. And everybody I know says they’ve done a very good job in getting the system back up and running.”