By Andy Byrnes Santa Monica
As an 83-year-old veteran of the Army Air Corps, I am appalled at what I think is the stupidity of doing a survey of the idling aircraft at Clover Field, when less than 1,000 yards away on Ocean Park Boulevard there are thousands of cars a day idling and/or accelerating at the stop lights from about 20th Street to Cloverfield Street 24 hours a day, and that is only one street in the airport area.
It doesn’t take an MIT graduate to figure out that the auto pollution in that area is several orders of magnitude greater than the relatively few, more efficient, and better maintained aircraft engines.
In addition, there are several hundred cars in the business district parking lot on or next to the airport with idling engines when entering or leaving this lot twice a day. This study is certainly a mindless mistake.
Why not place a few air sampling devices along Ocean Park Boulevard and compare them to ones placed along the airport runway?
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 8, 2006. Read the original PDF.