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FAA: Santa Ana winds forced jetliners over HB
by Robb Fulcher
Hermosans who have recently heard jetliners pass over town after midnight should blame the Santa Ana winds for forcing pilots to deviate from standard procedure and take off to the east, Federal Aviation Administration officials said.
"Our normal policy after midnight is to send planes out west, over the ocean," Bob Schimelpfening, air traffic operations specialist, said on Friday. In those cases, heavy eastbound jetliners can gain altitude over the ocean before doubling back over populated land.
But the heaviest jetliners must take off into the wind to get the lift they need, and stiff east-to-west winds give pilots no choice but to take off to the east, Schimelpfening said.
The procedure is not new, he added.
Hermosa Councilman Sam Edgerton, a local leader in LAX expansion and over-flight issues, said on Monday that the procedure is in fact new, and said he has extracted a promise from the FAA to end it.
From now on, Edgerton said, jetliners will remain grounded until the wind changes, allowing a westbound takeoff.
Leafing through recent reports of late-night eastbound departures, Schimelpfening found that between midnight and 1 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 11, three fuel-laden 747's bound for Asia took off to the east, hung a right turn over Inglewood and hooked back westward over the South Bay at about 4,000 feet.
The three pilots, flying for China Airlines, Korea Airlines and Eva Air, had little choice but to fly over populated land, Schimelpfening said. To fly higher over the South Bay, he said, the planes would have to fly low over a greater stretch of populated land to the east of the airport.
"I have emails from citizens all over the place, and the only thing I can tell them-I don't know what to tell them," Schimelpfening said.
The recent over-flights were discussed at last Tuesday's regular meeting of the Hermosa Beach City Council.
Hermosa entrepreneur and pilot instructor Charles Fogg told the council that LAX may be sending yet more jetliners over Hermosa Beach, and called for continued investigation of the airport's flight patterns. Fogg said that in some cases the jetliners were zipping overhead within 1,800 to 2,000 feet of the ground, using airspace that can be occupied by small planes.
Schimelpfening said the jetliners have not been flying over Hermosa that low, and have not been invading the airspace of smaller planes.
LAX loopy?
The matter of jetliner flights over the beach cities drew local media attention last year, when Edgerton led a battle that resulted in a promise by aviation officials to stop pilots from regularly looping over the beach cities on their exit from LAX.
Edgerton proved that the "Daggett Loop" over-flights indeed were occurring when he found an aviation contractor, Walter White of the San Diego-based Southern California Tracon, whose tracking software showed the flight path of the jets.
On Monday Edgerton said the Daggett Loop was still being flown, and that the only concession made so far by the FAA has been to stop heavier, slower-climbing jets from performing the maneuver.
The loop maneuver is performed by pilots of eastbound planes that are departing from westbound runways. The pilots climb out over the Pacific Ocean and make a U-turn to head east.
Edgerton has said that an average of 134 flights a day made some version of the Daggett Loop last March.
The FAA promised to push the looping flights farther to the north, over the airport itself, as official protocol demands, Edgerton said.
Edgerton will lead a demonstration Feb. 7 at an FAA facility in Hawthorne to protest the agency's disbanding of a task force on LAX noise, the continued flying of the Daggett Loop, continued flights of turboprop planes over the beach cities, and continued flights over the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
Scheduled to take part in the demonstration are members of a Hermosa-based group called Clear the Air and a peninsula-based group called PANIC. ER