Pilots Voice Concerns on FAA’s New Flight Rules

On her frequent flights to Santa Barbara as a private pilot, Ann Miller used to head from Fullerton Airport to the coast and on up.

But under new Los Angeles Basin flight restrictions that took effect Aug. 19, the Buena Park pilot said Tuesday night, she may start taking a landlubber’s route--flying over the Santa Ana Freeway and buzzing downtown Los Angeles at heights no greater than 2,000 feet.

“That’s very dangerous,” admitted Miller, secretary of the Fullerton 99s, the local chapter of the International Organization of Women Pilots. “It’s not a good practice, but we’ll have to do it.”

Miller was one of about 1,000 private pilots, the bulk of them from Orange County, who packed the 1,000-seat base theater at the Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center on Tuesday night. They were at a seminar to learn how to operate under the new restrictions.

But education was not the only item that drew the pilots to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn. seminar, the first of three planned for the area.

Despite instructions from John Hammons of the association’s Air Safety Foundation not to turn the event into a political forum, the pilots used the gathering to denounce Federal Aviation Administration emergency directives issued in response to 51 near-collisions over the region in 12 months. The restrictions have drastically limited private, or general-use, pilots’ access to the Los Angeles Basin, crowding them into corridors 22 miles west or east of Los Angeles International Airport.

Even an FAA official joined the pilots’ grumbling. Paul Stebbleton, an accident-prevention specialist for the FAA, threatened to turn the seminar into a pep rally when he told the wildly applauding audience: “The corridor should be for the airliners. Open up the airspace for general aviation pilots.”

But after Stebbleton, the audience settled back to listen to technical instructions about how to live with the new guidelines. Occasionally the audience broke out into boos and jeers, with members shouting, “Let us fly!” and “That’s not right!”

David Moore, a Westminster portrait photographer and student pilot, shouted: “It’s the Great Wall of Los Angeles! They’ve got one in China. Now we’ve got one in L.A.”

After one such outburst, John O’Leary, a Los Angeles terminal radio approach controller, said: “You are buzzing now. You should have heard us.”

The restrictions raised the ceiling of Los Angeles International Airport’s Terminal Control Area, an expanse set aside primarily for airliners, from 7,000 feet to 12,500 feet. This severely discourages many pilots from flying within the TCA, since the new ceiling is above the capability of most small planes.

Flight Corridor Eliminated

In addition, pilots flying up or down the coast without radio air traffic control assistance can no longer fly through the TCA. A low-altitude visual flight corridor that permitted such coastal passage near LAX has been eliminated.

The changes affect the 150 to 300 private pilots who flew through the coastal corridor each day and several times as many who daily flew above the TCA’s old 7,000-foot ceiling, according to estimates by FAA officials and air traffic controllers.

The 260,000-member, Maryland-based Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., which for years has lobbied against restrictions on general aviation, is supporting a lawsuit filed against the FAA by Orange County attorney Scott Raphael.

Other plaintiffs in the suit include the California Aviation Council, the Santa Monica Airport Assn. and the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Assn. of Air Traffic Controllers, among others. They accuse the FAA acted arbitrarily by not giving pilots advance notice.

Pilots, local airport managers and some air traffic controllers have said the restrictions will only push the dangerous cluster of planes into unregulated airspace over eastern Los Angeles County as private pilots begin searching for alternate routes.

Dangerous Crowding Feared

One of those new routes circles 25 miles around LAX, traversing La Puente, Fullerton, Garden Grove and Anaheim, where there is no floor or ceiling restriction.

“That’s over our house,” said Rollie Tackett, a Garden Grove ultra-light pilot who expressed concern that the airspace would become dangerously crowded under the new restrictions. The path has long been popular with general-aviation pilots seeking to escape the TCA.

Another way around the restrictions is along a corridor over downtown Los Angeles, where the floor of one segment of the TCA is 2,000 feet. That’s the route Ann Miller spoke of.

The problem, private pilots say, is that air traffic controllers are too busy with commercial traffic to talk them through the TCA. Carolin Weber, a Riverside private pilot, told of trying to contact an air traffic controller last Thursday as she was flying over Ontario Airport. She said the Ontario tower operators radioed that they were too busy for her small plane and told her either to circle until they were ready or find an alternate route around the TCA.

She said those problems would only get worse around LAX with the new restrictions. “It’s making it almost physically impossible to get through,” she said.

Tracking Equipment Lacking

Controller O’Leary admitted that once a pilot gets clearance to enter the TCA, there may be a problem with air traffic controllers shuffling the small planes among each other while keeping up with the big jets.

Another pilot, Mike Haley of Anaheim, pointed out that many private pilots do not have the radar-tracking equipment that LAX controllers require in the Los Angeles TCA. “It’s a bummer,” Haley said.

The AOPA seminars, co-sponsored by the FAA, crisscross the country, spreading safety instructions tailored to each city’s situation, said Edmund Pinto, AOPA vice president.

The number of seminars was tripled almost a year ago after the collision of an Aeromexico jetliner and a small plane over Cerritos that claimed 82 lives. Since the Cerritos air crash, Pinto said, the seminars have been held in 125 cities, reaching 30,000 pilots.