By Ping Ho Member, Friends of Sunset Park Airport Committee
There is a common misperception that Santa Monica Airport was here before the neighborhood grew around it (“Grounding pollution,” April 23). However, in reviewing a recent UCLA legal analysis of the 1984 agreement between Santa Monica and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), I was surprised to find that the existence of homes preceded the airport. Santa Monica Airport was not designed for jets, and the agreement between city and the FAA was predicated upon the original fleet mix, which also did not include jets. Now, larger and larger jets, and more and more of them, use the airport each year. This represents an increase of over 1,500 percent since 1983.
Homes around Santa Monica Airport are closer to the runway ends than any other airport in the state. In addition, the airport has no buffer zones, which are considered to be so important that Congress recently required that all commercial airports install Runway Safety Areas. By the FAA’s own guidelines, if Santa Monica Airport were newly built, it would require 1,000 feet of clearance on both ends of the runway in order to accommodate the kind of jets that are currently in use.
A USC environmental scientist used mapping technology to show that several square blocks of homes adjacent to Santa Monica Airport would be destroyed in the event of a runway overrun akin to one that occurred in 2005 at a comparable airport in Texas, involving a type of plane that uses Santa Monica Airport.
My main concern is the jet pollution, which I have been able to smell consistently from my home for the past 10 years. When my son was in 7th grade, he did a study with the guidance of environmental scientists from UCLA, USC and the California Air Resources Board, and found that jets from Santa Monica Airport spew forth gobs of highly toxic ultrafine particles that infiltrate the community. The levels that he found were five times higher than what you would find near a freeway and 40 times more concentrated than what you would find in a sample of air. My son found peak levels to be associated with fumes, particularly from idling and taxiing. This spawned a series of studies by distinguished scientists that have confirmed his findings. A recent UCLA-USC study reported that the number of ultrafine particles in jet exhaust, during idle or take-off mode, is about one quadrillion (that’s 10, followed by 15 zeroes!) per kilogram of jet fuel burned.
This is why we have the right — and responsibility — to complain.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 24, 2007. Read the original PDF.