Clearing the Skies

Washington has called time out in a game that private fliers and the airlines have played for years but that suddenly is a matter of life and death. It was the kind of desperation call that a referee makes when he sees that a game, at least as it was being played in Los Angeles, is out of control.

The game has to do with who has first claim on airspace, particularly over and near major cities. The airlines say that they do because they carry passengers and run on tight schedules. Private fliers, who at any given time may be a lawyer flying to Catalina for a long lunch or a charter pilot rushing a human heart to a hospital for a transplant operation, don’t challenge that. But for years they have used their power with Congress to make certain that they give up as little freedom as necessary, which in itself has contributed to dubious compromises that don’t serve the best interests of either the airlines or general aviation.

The game was friendly and harmless enough in years past. But as the clouds of planes and helicopters thickened relentlessly and the Federal Aviation Administration missed one deadline after another for adding equipment and personnel to cope with the cloud, urban skies have come to look like big-city sidewalks during a garbage strike.

The time-out, called by T. Allan McArtor, the FAA’s new national director, is welcome on one level, and perhaps only one. The old air-traffic-control plan for Los Angeles that banned smaller aircraft from the sectors of the sky that airliners used in getting to and from Los Angeles International Airport was not working. The first tragic sign of that was last year’s collision over Cerritos between a small plane and an Aeromexico airliner that left 82 people dead. A reminder came Tuesday evening when the pilot of a jetliner with 78 passengers aboard, nosing down from 7,000 feet for a landing in Los Angeles, had to stand his plane on one wing like some sort of jet fighter in order to avoid a small plane headed straight for him. Another reminder of the hazards of air traffic came Thursday when President Reagan’s helicopter had to take evasive action to avoid a small plane on the way to Reagan’s Santa Barbara ranch.

The FAA had been working for months on a plan to expand the control area through which private planes could fly only if they were guided by air controllers watching their blips on radar screens. A new plan usually requires two years of public hearings. On Wednesday the FAA bypassed hearings and imposed the plan on the spot.

Airline spokesmen quoted in The Times on Thursday seemed generally to favor the plan. Private fliers did not. Its worst feature, they said, called for closing a so-called coastal corridor that allowed planes to fly from south to north at low altitudes over Los Angeles airport. The closure would force them to detour around Los Angeles along a narrow corridor, generally following the Los Angeles River, bunching them up, mixing them in with helicopters and increasing the threat of near-hits and hits involving small planes.

What the FAA has chosen to do is test its new plan in the air rather than in arguments in hearing rooms cluttered with conflicting charts and graphs. It is a risk that the FAA apparently thinks is better than letting the game get further out of hand.

We cannot measure the validity of the concerns of private fliers over the new plan. All we know is that Los Angeles leads the nation in the number of near-collisions in its skies. We know, too, that on one day the federal Transportation Department insists that the air is under control and on another the FAA says that there is no such thing as 100% radar coverage around a busy airport. Both statements can’t be right.

The welcome aspect of the action is that Washington finally seems to be gripped by the sense of urgency about air safety that is so common among airline passengers. If Washington uses the time-out to turn that sense of urgency to a faster installation of new equipment and training of new controllers and to a double-checking of new traffic-control plans to make certain that they truly do more good than harm, it will be worthwhile.