As one LAX project ends, another begins

The southernmost runway reopens as more-risky construction starts on a taxiway between two airstrips.

Even as they reopen the southernmost runway at Los Angeles International Airport today, officials are looking ahead to a more dangerous project: building a parallel taxiway between two runways while jets traveling more than 100 mph take off and land just yards away on each side.

Dozens of excavators, oversized dump trucks and other machines will toil 20 hours a day to build a 1.8-mile-long concrete taxiway on the airport’s south side, even as controllers work to wedge in hundreds of flights around them.

“This is, without a doubt, a greater safety concern,” said Jake Adams, runway project manager for the city’s airport agency. “We’re taking the appropriate measures to make sure the contractor does what he’s supposed to do.”

Airport officials said they were satisfied with Tutor-Saliba Corp. and its subcontractors’ safety record during reconstruction of the southernmost runway, 55 feet farther away from its twin. The project is coming in 7% under budget and only about a week late despite some unexpected obstacles.

“We put in $170 million worth of runway work in seven months and blew everyone’s mind,” said Ronald N. Tutor, president of Tutor-Saliba. “It was uneventful.”

Even so, building inspectors cited the firm and its subcontractors several times since work began in July for not complying with stringent safety requirements, a Times review of inspection reports found.

The requirements included erecting orange plastic fencing around various job sites, installing beacons and large orange-and-white checkered flags on construction vehicles, not overloading trucks and providing flagmen to ensure that trucks yield to aircraft.

The citations were meant in large part to reinforce safety rules so the contractor and workers understood the importance of adhering to them when construction on the center taxiway begins this month, Adams said. Officials expect to complete the project in June 2008.

The city’s airport agency spent years trying to convince residents and the City Council that it needed to rework the south airfield at LAX to prevent close calls between aircraft on the ground.

About 80% of such incidents occurred on the south side when pilots landed on the outer runway, turned onto a series of taxiways and stopped too close to the inner runway, where aircraft take off. LAX historically has had among the nation’s highest rates of so-called runway incursions.

By moving the southernmost runway and installing a center taxiway, officials hope to cut down on incursions. When the project is finished, pilots will be directed by controllers after they land to turn onto the taxiway, where they will await clearance to cross the inner runway.

A settlement agreement forged between airport-area communities and the agency in late 2005 allowed some projects in Mayor James K. Hahn’s $11-billion LAX modernization plan to proceed — including the $330-million south airfield reconstruction.

Moving the southernmost runway was a massive undertaking that required months of planning to reorchestrate the airport’s 1,800 flights a day.

Airlines and air traffic controllers were concerned that shutting down one of the airport’s four runways for the project would cause delays, not just at LAX, but also at other regional airports.

But things went relatively smoothly. Less than 1% of all flights from July through March experienced reportable delays — or those 15 minutes or longer — as a result of the runway closure, according to air traffic control data.

Officials said months of planning by the FAA and the airport agency, fewer operations at LAX and good weather helped keep delays at bay.

“I’ll bet if you spoke with the average passenger flying through here, they wouldn’t have known anything was different,” said Marv Shappi, operations manager at the LAX tower.

Project managers also managed to avoid concrete shortages common in today’s busy construction environment by calling on several pre-approved suppliers.

There were several problems, however. Early on, workers discovered a 1,200-foot runway buried near the Sepulveda Tunnel. The 1940s-era runway wasn’t on construction documents and required the contractor to stop the entire project to remove the concrete. The excavation cost $1.3 million and delayed reconstruction efforts for 23 days.

There also were several incidents involving damage to “critical cables” that supplied power and information to sensitive equipment that pilots use to navigate the airfield, according to a letter from the Federal Aviation Administration to the city’s airport agency obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Correspondence between George Aiken, the FAA’s manager for safety and standards, and Lydia Kennard, then the agency’s executive director, points to four instances from Aug. 7 to Dec. 8 when workers severed or damaged cables. Flights were delayed in a Nov. 7 incident after a contractor sliced through a cable, cutting power to lights that pilots relied on to orient aircraft for takeoff and landing on the inner runway on the airport’s south side.

In additional correspondence, Kennard attributed the problems to the contractor, who, she wrote, failed to mark the conduits properly or didn’t “exercise proper care” when working around them. Tutor-Saliba referred questions on the matter to the airport agency.

The agency promised to increase inspections of construction activities, according to a follow-up letter March 28 from Aiken to Samson Mengistu, the agency’s acting executive director. In it, the FAA reminded airport officials that they must “strictly enforce airfield safety” to ensure construction doesn’t interfere with navigation aids.

As for the center taxiway, it will be built in multiple phases to allow officials to rebuild a series of taxiways that connect the southern runways while continuing to operate an active airfield. The inner runway will have to be closed periodically to allow workers to stitch on these taxiways. The closures may come from 1 to 7 a.m. and could affect heavy jets headed to Asia that typically depart in the early morning.

Since the inner runway on the airport’s south side is its longest, carriers must plan ahead for its closure to ensure that their aircraft aren’t too heavy to take off on one of LAX’s three other runways.

“Were talking about less than a half dozen airlines,” said Frank Clark, executive director of the nonprofit organization that represents carriers operating at the Tom Bradley International Terminal.

He said the airport agency is “good about giving them advance notice … so they can plan accordingly if they have to hold off cargo and work it through other cities.”

Air traffic controllers said center taxiway construction will not require them to reroute flights as extensively as they did when the southernmost runway was closed.

When the runway reopens, however, controllers will need some time to adjust to directing planes onto fewer taxiways between the two runways on the south side, said Shappi, the operations manager at the LAX tower.

Residents also will be in for an adjustment period when flights resume on the southernmost runway. Airport officials are bracing for noise complaints from neighboring communities.

“We’re really concerned about the perception of the runway being 55 feet closer,” said Adams, the airport agency’s runway project manager. “For the last eight months, they’ve had a wonderful silence. The reality is the runway is not significantly louder now.”