The Bell Curve:

I’m one of those “foolish” people, so identified by Pilot reader Mike Aguilar, because we’re mad as hell that John Wayne Airport has encroached on our lives in steadily growing increments. And say so. And will continue to say so when the next increment, presently underway, will be dropped on us.

Aguilar is a self-styled grin-and-bear-it man who “chose to live here” and share our airport problems without complaining — a decision that might just have been made easier by the fact that he works at the airport. Which allows him to tell us that if we can’t “take the noise and pollution, just move.”

So he’s very unhappy and a little contemptuous of those of us who can’t match his willpower to tough it out. Or subscribe to his line of reasoning, which goes roughly like this: When we bought our homes under the traffic pattern of what — for many of us — was called Orange County Airport, we should have known it was going to be turned into a commercial behemoth that would threaten our sleep and patio parties and property values and state of mind. Therefore, we should have shopped for real estate in Garden Grove or Santa Ana, where aircraft noise wasn’t a problem to our sensitivities.

What we saw in those early days was a private landing strip for aviation pioneer Eddie Martin’s flying school. It was turned into a regional airport shortly after a terminal to accommodate 400,000 passengers annually was built in 1967. The airport became publicly owned through a land swap between the Irvine Co. and the county. That was the beginning of our watching the cute little puppy in our closet grow into a wolf at our front door — a wolf that might be looking to morph into an elephant if we keep feeding him — which happens to be an imminent possibility.

If you doubt that, take the Irvine Avenue entrance into John Wayne and look to your left. The construction you see was priced out at $652 million and has been carefully presented to Newport-Mesa residents as an “Improvement Program,” not, God forbid, an expansion. This at a time when our economy is in the toilet and the number of passengers at JWA has dropped from 10 million to 9 million in the past year.

This new construction grew out of an amendment to a 1985 settlement agreement between Orange County and Newport Beach that defined parameters for airport facilities and operations. The terms of the 2003 amendment, in the words of Airport Director Alan Murphy “extend environmental protection for the surrounding community and provide for additional passenger facilities and operation.”

That sounds to me like an invitation to new guests to join the daily party that convenes every five minutes or so over my backyard at airplane rush hour. When and if that happens, it’ll be too late to decide whether this $652-million beauty was a boondoggle in a fragile economy, a device to ensure the expansion of JWA, or just bad timing for cosmetic touches.

While we wait, there is vitally important business to be taken care of here on Earth. Between 2011 and 2015, the JWA agreement raises the passenger cap from 10.3 million to 10.8 million. If a new settlement hasn’t been negotiated with the county by then, the sky is both literally and figuratively the limit.

The Airport Working Group and AirFair will continue to do yeoman service on our behalf, but they badly need citizen support. And that, oddly enough, has been hard to generate. Thousands of residents drive past the new construction daily without projecting what it will be like here if the passenger cap takes flight and the new Terminal C opens its arms to them.

To prevent that, all of us under the JWA flight path need to embrace AirFair’s stated goal to “stop expansion of JWA while raising the level of discourse about a permanent curfew and flight and passenger caps.

I would like to add a postscript to Steve Smith’s strong and properly outraged column this week about reaction to the threats directed at a young woman student by three student athletes at Corona del Mar High School. I share Smith’s outrage, so I called the school district office to find out what action had been taken and got their spokeswoman, Laura Boss. Here’s what I learned, without repeating the oft-reported account of the behavior of these young role models:

When administrators learned of the alleged death threats posted on Facebook by several of their students, Corona del Mar High School suspended those responsible and reported their behavior to local police. This action was reported to the district, which also heard from the victim’s parents. The district supported the high school’s handling of the matter, and after investigating twice, police decided that no law had been broken that would require further investigation.

All of the culprits were seniors and graduated with their class. There was no asterisk on their diplomas. If there was remorse, it hasn’t surfaced. Only the wish that the punishment might have better suited the crime.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.