Marines: Miramar airport won't fly

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer | Friday, June 2, 2006 10:56 PM PDT ∞

MIRAMAR MARINE CORPS AIR STATION ---- To the public, it may sound simple and innocuous: A regional agency wants a mere 3,000 of the Marines' 23,000 acres at Miramar for an international airport and would be quite content if the military kept, and continued to train on, the remainder of its base in the heart of San Diego County.

But Marine Lt. Col. Rick Pagel said Friday that the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, poised to recommend Miramar next week as its preferred site for a new airport, is proposing something that is far more complex than what appears on the surface.

The airport authority is essentially proposing "a two-dimensional solution to a three-dimensional problem," Pagel said during a three-hour base tour for the media, to make the case that Miramar is the wrong location for a commercial airport.

Airport Authority officials have acknowledged that the Marines would have to shift activities around if airliners were to land at Miramar, but they maintain that military and civilian operations could be compatible if both sides exercised some imagination.

A Monday vote by the authority board is expected to cap a 3 1/2-year search for a site for an airport to replace cramped Lindbergh Field, which agency officials contend will run out of room to handle passenger and cargo growth as early as 2020. With 17 million passengers passing through its gates last year, Lindbergh is the nation's busiest single-runway commercial airport.

Candidate airport sites include Miramar, Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, Naval Air Station North Island, Campo, Borrego Springs, Imperial County and March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, as well as an expanded Lindbergh. Military officers have repeatedly and emphatically insisted that none of the local bases are available, and federal legislation would bar their use.

As F-18s screamed overhead at 160 mph, and pilots practiced left-hand turns and aircraft-carrier landings over and over again Friday morning, Pagel suggested the third dimension is the Marine air space that airliners would invade. Even if the Marines could find 3,000 acres to give up, he said, in the sky above, the relatively slow-moving commercial jets would not mix with the speedy and maneuverable military jets.

The F-18s practice off and on between 7:30 a.m. and midnight Monday through Thursday, between 7:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Saturday and between 2 and 6 p.m. on Sunday, Pagel said. And because of the nature of what they are doing, in practicing carrier landings, F-18 pilots tend to circle over and over again, he said.

"They're going to keep going until they get it down," Pagel said, of the touch-and-gos that simulate carrier landings. "We don't want them to make a mistake when they're out on the boat."

Consequently, he said, it wouldn't make sense to expect a pilot to make a pass or two, and then get out of the way so an airliner could make its approach.

And it's not likely that the military could shift the carrier landing practices to Camp Pendleton if the authority were to propose a compromise that entailed constructing a runway for Marines there, said Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, commander of Marine Corps Installations West.

"What we do at Camp Pendleton is train for war," Lehnert said. "The air around Camp Pendleton tends to be filled with bullets."

Pagel said the current situation at Miramar is ideal for pilot training because it is safe, and because the flying pattern keeps jets north of State Route 52. If any plane falls to the ground, it will fall onto the base rather than onto houses, and there is minimal noise impact, he said.

But the construction of runways next to the existing airfield to accommodate the airliners would push the pattern either over Mira Mesa and Scripps Ranch to the north, or over Clairemont Mesa, Kearny Mesa and Tierrasanta to the south, introducing danger and noise to the neighborhoods that largely do not have to worry about either now, Pagel said.

There would be other impacts on the ground as well.

Miramar is home to more than 3,000 biologically rich seasonal ponds called vernal pools, and close to half would be covered by a new airport, said Dave Boyer, Miramar's director of natural resources. That is of particular concern, he said, because about 97 percent of the county's original vernal pools have been paved over, and 80 percent of remaining pools are on Miramar.

At least five of the 10 endangered species on the base would be affected, Boyer said. He said those include the San Diego fairy shrimp, San Diego mesa mint plant, San Diego button celery plant, coastal California gnatcatcher bird and the willowy monardella plant.

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 740-5442 or ddowney@nctimes.com.