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# Banning jets is about politics, not public safety
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/banning-jets-is-about-politics-not-public-safety/
- Published: 2008-07-22T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T20:16:22.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica Airport, #archive-import

*By J. BATES is a Venice resident.*

IN THE JUNE 21-22 WEEKEND EDITION, Brian Bland, supposedly writing as a concerned neighbor, responded to a letter by Michael Tennenbaum regarding the Santa Monica City Council’s attempt to ban Class C and D jets \[at the Santa Monica Airport\]. Mr. Bland attempted to refute the claim that the ban had more to do with politics than safety.

In fact, Mr. Bland is a member of the board of directors of the neighborhood political group Friends of Sunset Park (FOSP) and knows all too well that the entire attempt to ban Class C and D jets is primarily politically motivated. We have regularly seen letters from other FOSP members (Zina Josephs, president; Lorraine Sanchez, vice president; Ping Ho, Airport Committee; Susan Hartley, member of the board and formerly head of the FOSP Airport Committee) harping on the dangers of various aspects of the operation of the airport. For the most part, these letters have failed to identify the writer as a member of a group that has as one of its primary purposes the closing of a valuable and historic Santa Monica facility.

Before we ever heard a word about runway overruns or exploding planes falling on houses, FOSP tried first to use noise and then to use pollution as reasons to ban jets from using Santa Monica Airport. Their Airport Committee has always been clear that its primary purpose is to find a way to ban jets and then to completely shut down the airport. When studies showed that airport noise (including that of jets) has actually declined over the last 15 years and that pollution from takeoffs and landings is less a factor in the surrounding neighborhoods than the daily pollution by cars and trucks in the area streets, FOSP turned to the supposed “safety” issue of larger jets dropping out of the sky on surrounding homes.

FOSP’s Chicken Little-like cries of “The jets are falling, the jets are falling” has been repeated so many times that people are actually accepting as fact what is a totally undocumented exaggeration. After millions of takeoffs and landings of Class C and D jets around the world, there are almost no instances of jets landing short or overshooting a runway and even fewer instances of fires, injuries, or deaths.

Motor vehicles routinely jump sidewalks or crash through barriers and run into residences, businesses and/or crowds of people, yet there is no talk of banning vehicles of any size from our streets.Many of these streets were designed and built when vehicles were smaller,less numerous and traveled slower, yet our council members don’t ever discuss restricting vehicle access based on size, frequency of travel or speed as they have airplanes. Not political? Hardly.

Smaller planes don’t necessarily carry less fuel than larger ones and aren’t inherently safer or liable to cause measurably less damage if they fall on your house. Banning Class C and D jets is just a first step in banning all jets and then all planes. It’s a political move, not a safety move. If the council members really wanted to promote airport safety, they would opt for the proposed crushable runway safety zones and cooperate with the FAA in buying houses to establish runway protection areas at both ends of the airport. They won’t, because it would be political suicide for any council member who backed such a proposal. That houses were built in these supposed “danger zones” in the first place was only done with the direct complicity of previous council members and developers. This is a political fact of life that is never discussed.

One of FOSP’s primary criteria for backing any council candidate is that candidate’s stand against the continued operation of the airport. No candidate who advocated working with airport neighbors and users to find ways to allow everyone to coexist in harmony has received anything other than scorn and ridicule from FOSP.

City Council members appointed Susan Hartley to the Santa Monica Airport Commission. Being both the former head of FOSP’s Airport Committee and a current FOSP board member and having openly stated that her single purpose as committee head was to find a way to close the airport, this appointment was nothing if not a political reward for FOSP’s support for certain council members. Her pronouncements as vice chair of the Airport Commission have been consistently and often stridently anti-jet and anti-airport.

In short, as Mr. Bland well knows, the whole move to ban Class C and D jets is less about safety than it is about one neighborhood group’s desire to close an airport and their use of political clout to aid them in reaching their goal. Runway safety is really only the latest guise under which FOSP is trying once again to gain sympathy for their campaign to close a vital asset to Santa Monica and to all her residents.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 22, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/072208.pdf?ref=smdp.com)