Private Pilots Protest : New Flight Rules Take Effect in Skies of L.A.

With much grumbling, hundreds of private pilots began searching for alternate paths through and around the Los Angeles Basin on Wednesday as the Federal Aviation Administration’s tough cutback of unregulated airspace around Los Angeles International Airport went into effect.

The changes were widely criticized by pilots, local airport managers and some air traffic controllers, who said that FAA chief T. Allan McArtor’s emergency order to keep private planes clear of jetliners at LAX is an ill-planned strategy that will create an equally hazardous cluster of planes in unregulated airspace over eastern Los Angeles County.

Takes Client to Lunch

Fred Culbert, a Sun Valley man who works as a transportation coordinator for movie studios, was one of the first pilots to experience the inconvenience. He showed up at Whiteman Airport in Pacoima Wednesday to take a client to lunch in his single-engine plane.

“I was going to fly him to Catalina to impress him,” Culbert said. Then he found out the FAA had closed a scenic coastal route that Culbert considers “an E ticket ride.” He wound up flying to Big Bear instead.

“It’s going to be confusing, complicated and it will take pilots a longer time to get there,” said Richard Vacar, a pilot, former FAA airspace planner and now airport affairs manager for the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport.

“They’ll fly lower over congested areas, and it will take pilots routinely to areas where they’ve never gone before,” Vacar said.

There appeared to be no significant problems reported by pilots or the FAA Wednesday. Aviation officials agreed that the real test will come this weekend, when substantial numbers of pleasure fliers take to the skies.

Under the changes, the ceiling to LAX’s Terminal Control Area has been raised to 12,500 feet from 7,000 feet. This severely discourages pilots flying under “visual flight rules,” in which constant radio contact with air traffic controllers is not required, from flying above the TCA, since the new ceiling is above the capability of most small planes.

In addition, pilots heading up or down the coast can no longer fly on their own through the TCA, a large swath of airspace intended primarily for commercial jets. 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.

One of the changes, the closing of the popular coastal corridor, was the target of an emergency petition filed Wednesday by a coalition representing pilots of small aircraft with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The 240,000-member Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., which for years has successfully lobbied against restrictions on general aviation, charged that the FAA acted arbitrarily by not giving advance notice to pilots. No action on the motion was taken Wednesday.

The closing of the coastal route also was criticized by freeway traffic reporters employed by Los Angeles television and radio stations, who said the closure made it impossible for them to adequately cover portions of the San Diego Freeway north of LAX.

“It is inconvenient and our reporting will suffer,” said KMPC radio’s Pamela McInnes.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for a 110,000-member airline passengers’ group said his organization welcomes the FAA’s emergency order.

“Because of the number of passengers involved, the rights of general aviation must be secondary when it comes to commercial aircraft,” said Daniel Smith of the Dallas-based International Airline Passengers Assn.

Pilots and others familiar with general aviation said that three main strategies were in use Wednesday among visual-flight pilots trying to cross the basin. All of them involved extra time or effort:

- Some flew underneath the TCA by heading away from the popular route along the coast. Because the TCA extends to the ground within 10 miles of LAX, pilots flew toward downtown Los Angeles, where the floor of one segment of the TCA is 2,000 feet. From there they proceeded either northwest or southeast, where other segments of the TCA provided higher floors. Gradually, pilots could swing around to their destination.

- Some flew around the entire TCA, heading for a north-south path 25 miles from LAX that traverses La Puente, Fullerton and Anaheim. This segment of airspace has no floor or ceiling restriction and has long been popular with general-aviation pilots seeking to escape the TCA.

- Some radioed FAA controllers and requested permission to fly through the TCA at a course and altitude set by controllers. Some of these pilots were allowed to enter. Others--20% by a reliable estimate--were told that because the controllers’ workload was too great at the moment, they would have to reach their destination another way.

One pilot, Bill Williams, a San Fernando Valley natural gas broker, had no problem obtaining permission to fly his two-engine plane through the TCA when he checked in with controllers at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday after taking off from Van Nuys Airport and heading south.

He continued toward Santa Ana, then turned around and made his way back to Van Nuys by picking his way beneath the TCA.

Like many pilots, Williams said he believed controllers’ time could be better spent handling jetliners than additional private planes. And he said he worried that pilots who are not used to the Los Angeles Basin will have trouble trying to maneuver under the TCA at altitudes between 1,000 and 2,000 feet, coping with obstacles like tall buildings, power lines and cross traffic from other airports like Compton and Long Beach.

“How’s a new guy going to thread that needle?” he asked.

Anthony Skirlick, a controller at the FAA’s Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale and a spokesman for the newly formed National Air Traffic Controllers Assn., said in an interview Wednesday that his organization is “extremely concerned” that a dangerous number of pilots who once avoided the TCA by flying above it will now travel outside it at the TCA’s eastern edge.

That area has long been a source of concern to airline pilots using a major LAX approach pattern from the east that crosses over the swath of unregulated airspace favored by private pilots.

“We’ve probably put 10 times as many planes there now,” Skirlick said. “We’re messing with numbers (of private planes) that are incredible. We’ll have a mid-air collision by Labor Day.”

Skirlick said his organization is urging the FAA to create a new visual flight corridor for private pilots between Seal Beach and Lake Hughes in northern Los Angeles County at an altitude above 8,000 feet.

John Galipault, director of the Ohio-based Aviation Safety Institute, was critical of the way the changes were implemented.

Like Skirlick, he said that FAA chief McArtor failed to consider the peripheral effects of his emergency order.

Officials of the FAA’s Western-Pacific region had been proceeding with their own airspace restriction plan, which was to take effect in two years. But one day after a near-collision between an American Airlines jet and a private plane over Santa Monica on Aug. 11, McArtor imposed more sweeping restrictions to take effect in a week.

(McArtor’s emergency order caused some pilots to question the credibility of H.C. McClure, director of the Western-Pacific region. Last week, at a briefing on how his staff planned to reconfigure the TCA, McClure said the TCA ceiling would increase to 12,500 feet but said nothing about closing the corridor. Hours later, from Washington, McArtor issued his emergency order.

(Pressed by reporters, McClure on Wednesday repeatedly denied suggestions that McArtor had added the corridor to the emergency order without consulting him. But McClure also denied that he had intentionally held back details of a proposed corridor closing from his briefing on the long-term airspace modifications being planned by his staff.

(Asked further about this contradiction, McClure told reporters that “I’ll be more candid about it” at another briefing in two weeks.)

Galipault called McArtor’s emergency order “a mind-blower.”

“You just don’t go out and change a piece of airspace without affecting all the other airspace adjacent to it. . . . This was not well thought out.”

At a news conference Wednesday, FAA officials dismissed such skepticism.

“There’s not a free-for-all going on outside the TCA,” said Timothy Forte, the Western-Pacific region’s flight standards manager. “We’re not going to have airplanes bouncing off the buildings of downtown Los Angeles.”

The Los Angeles approach control center and the Palmdale center will share air traffic control responsibility for planes that need permission to enter the new space added to the TCA.

Times staff writer Claudia Puig contributed to this story.