Concerns Raised Over San Diego Airport Sites

Mar. 14--SAN DIEGO ---- Problems surfaced Monday for three of six sites under study for a new San Diego County international airport.

A university official informed the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority that two sites ---- Campo in southeastern San Diego County and the Imperial County desert ---- would create annoying "light pollution" and might shut down a world-class observatory. An aviation consultant told members a third site, Naval Air Station North Island, would be vulnerable to shifting winds.

Those developments came during a meeting of the airport authority's strategic planning committee Monday at Lindbergh Field. No decisions were made.

Forecasting that passenger traffic at Lindbergh will soar from 17.4 million last year to between 25.8 million and 32.6 million in 2030, triggering severe congestion, the authority says the region needs an airport with twin, 12,000-foot runways to keep pace. The authority is studying whether to expand Lindbergh, the nation's busiest single-runway commercial airfield, or build a new airport.

Besides Campo, Imperial County and North Island, the agency is studying Miramar Marine Corps Air Station and a site on Camp Pendleton close to Oceanside, two miles east of Interstate 5 and a mile and a half north of Highway 76.

The board intends to name a plan for meeting the county's air travel needs in May, and to craft an advisory measure around it for the November ballot.

The board has been told repeatedly by military brass that none of the three bases will become available at any point in the future. And on Monday came word that two civilian sites pose serious problems, at least from the viewpoint of a college astronomy program.

Paul Etzel, director of San Diego State University's Mount Laguna Observatory, said the extraordinarily clear view of the stars offered by the 6,100-foot peak's telescopes would blur dramatically if a major airport was built at either Campo or Imperial County.

Etzel said the lights of the airport itself, not to mention the development around it that inevitably would sweep in on its coattails, would be one problem. The bright landing lights of jets flying in from the east would be another, he said.

"It would be a double-edged sword," he said.

Located 50 miles east of downtown San Diego in the Cleveland National Forest, Mount Laguna offers perhaps the best vantage point in Southern California from which to gaze at stars, planets and galaxies because its skies are only 10 percent brighter than those outside range of city lights, Etzel said. In contrast, Mount Palomar's skies are about 25 percent brighter, due in large part to the Temecula Valley's mushrooming growth.

Mount Laguna's four telescopes range in size from 16 to 48 inches, and plans are in the works to build a $7.1 million, 96-inch robotic scope on the peak, Etzel said. He said interest in a fundraising campaign for the project has been waning in the wake of the airport site search.

In the other presentation, aviation consultant Joe Huy of Chicago-based Ricondo & Associates said that the two proposed runways at Naval Air Station North Island could operate simultaneously 80 percent of the time, when prevailing winds are out of the west. But Huy said hot Santa Anas and stormy northwest winds would trigger restrictions because of the peculiar orientation of the runways. Erratic winds could temporarily sideline one or both of North Island's runways and significantly reduce the airfield's capacity.

"This is a heads-up that this is quite problematic," board member Bill Lynch said.

Because of limited space at North Island, consultants maintain the best way to get two runways at the naval base would be to orient them at right angles. They have suggested one should run 12,000 feet north to south, and the other 9,500 feet from northwest to southeast.

North Island would not become an international airport unto itself. Rather, it would become a tool for expanding Lindbergh.

In that scenario, Lindbergh's existing runway would remain intact. A new terminal there would ferry passengers over to North Island concourses via a three-mile train system in a tunnel under San Diego Bay.

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