V-plan supporters pumped by pilot backing

Paul Clinton

NEWPORT BEACH -- A pilots union endorsement of an alternative runway

alignment for the proposed El Toro airport has energized the group

circulating the plan.

Members of the New Millennium Group gleefully welcomed the endorsement

by the Air Line Pilots Assn. of their V-plan this week.

Bob McGowan, a group member and former United Airlines pilot, said the

pilots’ opinions could carry some weight with the Federal Aviation

Administration.

“It does give us a lot of credibility,” McGowan said. “The FAA does

listen.”

In a Tuesday news release, Capt. Jon Russell, the regional safety

chairman for the pilots’ group, said the V-plan is preferable to the

county’s plan.

“Airline pilots are very much interested in having a viable airport at

El Toro,” Russell wrote. “Unless [our] recommendations are incorporated

into the plan, El Toro will at best be a crippled facility, unable to

contribute fully to the commercial aviation grid.”

The V-plan was first proposed by Charles Griffin, a Newport Beach

resident and former aviation engineer, in the late 1990s. Under the plan,

the crossbar runways at the closed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station would

be realigned to form a “V” pattern.

Planes would take off to the southwest on a new runway, instead of to

the north and east, as the county has proposed. That would send them over

open space owned by the Irvine Co., parts of Newport Coast and Crystal

Cove.

As a result, V-plan supporters say, fewer houses in both North and

South County would be under the airport’s flight path.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors approved an airport for the

base on Tuesday that could handle 18.8 million passengers by 2010.

Critics of the V-plan said the pilots’ endorsement may give the plan

some political traction but wouldn’t lead to its implementation.

The FAA has said it would not review the V-plan because it is not the

county’s preferred plan.

And V-plan supporters are not involved in the formal process of

planning the airport at the closed El Toro base.

“They don’t have a dog in this hunt,” said Dave Ellis, the spokesman

of the Airport Working Group. “They’re just another interested party in

the discussion.”

* Paul Clinton covers the environment and John Wayne Airport. He may

be reached at (949) 764-4330 or by e-mail ato7

[email protected] .