Santa Monica Airport Bans Jet Traffic

In article Stella Starr writes:

If you go look at the local paper (it takes a while to load, as they're
back in the 20th century and put a PDF of the thing on their website)
you'll note a couple interesting things, including a number of runway
overrun accidents in recent years. And after the jump (when the story's
continued to page 17) the aerial photo shows the city snuggled right up
around the landing strip, a clear example of bad metro development.

http://www.smdp.com/site/archives/032908.pdf

The story tells of a proposal to buy up homes to give a little safety
room around the airport, but a lot of homeowners resist the idea, which
would be pretty spendy (California real estate -- ya THINK?!) and kind
of after the fact.

We need more property manager expertise in today's airport managers.


I think you will find that there were houses just across the street
from both ends of the runway at Santa Monica well over 30 years ago.

I know that they were there 30 years ago when I first flew in and out
of SMO. They were nowhere near new, then, either. I would expect that
50 to 60 years back there were houses at both ends.

Yes, we need to not build up housing in the desirable area around
airports, but this is not a recent problem. As I mentioned before,
they had a big "NO JETS" on the slope just before runway 21 back in
1977, which was about the time they lost on banning jets then.

(I think they claimed jets were noisier, and lost when it was pointed
out that some jets are quieter than props. But, that was a long time
ago, and I was not that intimately involved with activity there.)


Alan