Villaraigosa continues to oppose a LAX runway reconfiguration

AP Photo

The Los Angeles International Airport's southernmost runway is demolished during a relocation project Monday, July 31, 2006, in Los Angeles. The runway will be moved about 55 feet to the south and a new centerline taxiway will be created in an effort to make runway incursions less likely.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said today he continues to oppose a reconfiguration of runways on the north side of Los Angeles International Airport, despite a letter from the head of the FAA calling on the city to realign the airfield to improve safety. The mayor conceded, however, that the Federal Aviation Administration had raised "serious safety questions" that he wanted addressed.

In a letter dated April 2, FAA Administrator J. Randolph Babbitt said the runway configuration continues to pose a safety risk, and failing to correct the situation "would be a serious mistake."
"I flew into LAX hundreds of times during my career as an airline pilot," Babbitt wrote in his letter to the mayor. "I can tell you from personal experience that the north airfield safety and efficiency would be greatly improved by further separating the two runways and building a center taxiway between them.
"Multiple expert studies over the past several years have reached the same conclusion," he wrote. "A similar reconfiguration of the LAX south airfield has eliminated the most serious runway incursions there and reduced all types of incursions by nearly 80 percent."
Babbitt noted that runway incursions were reported at LAX on March 6 and 16, and such incidents at LAX "were all too familiar."
In a statement, Villaraigosa said he still opposes a reconfiguration of the north airfield "absent a clear demonstration that such a change is necessary to ensure the safety of passengers, workers and the surrounding community."
The mayor conceded that Babbitt's letter and an accompanying FAA study of the airfield raised "important points and new information."
"The FAA has raised serious safety questions that cannot be ignored," Villaraigosa said. "As such, I have asked the Board of Airport Commissioners and Los Angeles World Airports to address the issues raised by the FAA as part of the current specific plan amendment study and environmental review of the LAX master plan."
In mid-February, a panel of academics and the NASA Ames Research Center released a North Airfield Safety Study that concluded the runways on the north side of LAX were safe in their current configuration and do not need to be adjusted.
The study was hailed as a major victory for residents living north of the airport who were concerned about proposals to reconstruct the northern airfield. One proposal would have shifted the northernmost runway, Runway 24R, as much as 340 feet to the north.
The panel found that while shifting Runway 24R to the north would lower the risk of airplane collisions, the current runway configuration is already "extremely safe."
"The panel estimates that, at 2020 traffic levels, fatal runway collisions would occur on the North Airfield at an expected rate of one every 200 years, and that such fatal collisions would cause approximately one death for every 150 million LAX passengers," according to the report. "That level of risk is low even relative to the exceptional safety of U.S. passenger aviation."
While noting that a variety of changes to the airfield alignment could technically improve safety, "because the baseline level of collision risk is so low, reducing that risk by a substantial percentage is of limited practical importance."
Babbitt, however, took issue with the report, saying the FAA had identified "several critical flaws in the study's assumptions, methodology and conclusions."
"The latest NASS (North Airfield Safety Study) recognizes that increasing runway separation and building a center taxiway would reduce the chances of a runway collision," Babbitt wrote. "But surprisingly, the study's summary conclusions downplay that finding, suggesting the airfield is safe enough now. The data and the two incursions earlier this month suggest otherwise.
"The status quo is not good enough for the FAA, and the city of Los Angeles should not view it as good enough for the traveling public. Everything possible must be done to make the north airfield as safe as it can be," Babbitt wrote.