Winging It In Traffic During Wayne Airport Construction

The cars come roaring off the San Diego Freeway, or barreling down MacArthur Boulevard, headed for John Wayne Airport and the plane they can catch only if everything breaks just right--a fantastic parking space, no lines, a quick check of the baggage.

All right! There it is, on MacArthur, the international symbol for an airport: white airplanes on a green background. But wait, what’s this? Hey, it’s an additional sign, a perfect symbol for today’s John Wayne Airport: “Detour.”

At a crosswalk on the road heading to the main terminal building, a bus shuttling passengers from outlying parking lots to the terminals stops abruptly. No one can see around the bus. Eventually the driver crosses the road to another shuttle bus and hands its driver a piece of paper. Car drivers fume. Shuttle driver No. 1 finally reboards and drives on.

Drivers hunting for spaces prowl the new parking structure, slowly passing tiny, hard-to-read signs that direct them higher and higher. “Caution, Level 4,” reads a warning as the driver emerges from mole-befitting darkness into blinding light to finally find a space--on the roof, in the baking heat. Only one of the three elevators is working and all of them are at the end of the 200-yard-long building farthest from the terminal.

Great. Just Great.

Construction at John Wayne has been going on for a year and a half now, in an attempt to replace the facility’s resemblance to a Third World airport with a facade a bit more suitable to the state’s third most populous county. A new $50-million terminal is the centerpiece of the $310-million expansion program. More than 12,000 passengers arrive and depart through the main terminal on an average day now. After the expansion is completed, the numbers will gradually increase to about double the current level.

But despite what a taxi driver termed “chaos,” and remembering that the airport was never a prize in the first place, how far downhill you think things have careened since construction began depends largely on where you stand.

Coming down on the side of gloom is Deputy Sheriff Keith Davis, who supervises the officers who make sure that no one climbs the fences onto the tarmac and that drivers don’t double-park for ridiculously long periods.

“It’s a mess,” Davis says in the long, narrow control room with flashing lights, numerous buttons and television monitors showing what’s going on outside the terminal. “It’s just a lot more traffic. You’ve got the parking lot closures and what have you, due to the construction.” In addition, some airlines have added a new type of aircraft, the Boeing 757, bringing more passengers in than in the old days. “It’s like two planes coming in now instead of one because of the passenger loads.”

On the two-lane, one-way road that passes in front of the terminal, there aren’t many spaces for people to pick up or drop off passengers, and the few metered parking spots just beyond the terminal are almost always full at peak times.

“There’s no place to park to pick up the people,” says Davis. “They just drive around in circles until (passengers being picked up) get their loads out of the baggage claim area. They don’t really appear to us to be parking in the parking structure to walk over to the terminal to meet their arriving passenger. They just drive around until the (arriving passengers) show up on the curb.” Still, passengers and those meeting them “are pretty good,” Davis says. “I think most people realize the situation, the way it is. You just have to live with it.”

Skycap William Pratt, in navy blue trousers and matching hat, white shirt looking crisp despite the heat, glides over to passengers emerging from a car in front of the terminal and starts to check their baggage.

One bag, three, eight, it doesn’t matter much to Pratt. He’ll use a dolly when he can, hoisting the bags on after he tags them, then wheeling them in to the baggage belt of whatever airline the passenger is flying. If it’s busy and some of his colleagues have the dollies tied up, he’ll grab a bag or two and simply manhandle them into the terminal.

Pratt leaves his Fullerton home each day around 5 a.m. for the 25-minute drive to the airport and a shift that lasts until 2 p.m. His minuet with the luggage never seems hurried; he just sort of glides from curbside to baggage belt, staying calm, not saying much, getting the luggage where it’s supposed to go.

“It’s rushed,” he says as passengers swirl around him on the sidewalk outside. “Travelers are . . . going all over.” Any problems due to construction? “No, it’d be like this regardless.”

Eight years ago he decided that being a full-time trumpet player wasn’t going to get it; he became a Skycap. Compared to hefting a trumpet, “this is work, “ he says. At the end of the day, though, despite handling bags and packages of freight that can weigh upward of 100 pounds, he claims not to be worn out. “Naw, I’m a man, “ he says.

Peter Roditis, 45, driver of the taxi that is third in line across the road from the terminal, with nine more stretched out behind his, has been waiting for half an hour to get to the front of the queue and get a passenger. He hopes it won’t be someone wanting to go just to a nearby hotel; maybe a nice long ride, like Fullerton.

“The construction right now is causing big problems here,” says Roditis, who lives in Anaheim and has been driving a taxi for 14 months. Around 8 or 9 p.m., he says, it may take a driver half an hour to get to the line-up road across from the terminal.

Roditis says the construction slows all traffic in the airport and on the road outside, making it nearly impossible to zoom out, drop a fare and get back to the airport and the line.

He usually works from 10 a.m. until 11 p.m., driving a cab he leases for $510 a week from the company that has the concession for the taxi business at John Wayne. He came from Greece five years ago, worked as a pizza cook, and then took the taxi job because “I like to drive. . . . Some day probably I’m going to be a truck driver so I can drive day and night, drive across the country.”

Depending on how bad the traffic is snarled, he figures he can get 10 to 15 fares from the airport in a day, charging either by the meter or by flat rate. He isn’t happy with passengers who have vouchers from airlines that cover the cost of a ride from John Wayne to Los Angeles International Airport. The vouchers pointedly tell a rider that the “tip is included.”

He is happy with people like the four passengers he drove a few weeks ago “over to the north parking lot, about a mile. And they realized it was a waste of time (for Roditis), so they gave me $30. After 14 months, that was the best tip I ever had.”

When the construction is done, there will be a new, larger terminal and more passengers arriving. That will mean more potential fares for Roditis and fewer traffic problems, he figures. He’s happy about that.

For now, he suffers the construction, earning money to support his wife and three children so the kids can go to good schools “so they can have a better job than I did.”

Marty Larsen, station manager for Trans World Airlines, can’t wait for the construction to end and his passengers to get an airport where they can actually walk from the terminal onto the plane, rather than schlepping out across the pavement before boarding.

“I don’t know that (construction) is a major problem that I can see,” he said from his vantage point inside the terminal and away from the road and parking structure. “Construction hasn’t affected the airlines’ performance.”

“The only suffering is by the traveling public because of the transition in parking,” Larsen says, but “I don’t think the employees as a whole have had a major problem in their lives.”

Right now, with mounds of dirt, piles of steel and scaffolding scattered about, it’s “kind of hard to tell” just how things are going, he says. “It’s certainly got to be an improvement” over what it was, he says. “I joke with my friends that when it’s over we’re going to have indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water.”

Larsen remembers his time in Kansas City for TWA, though, when, as at John Wayne now, people hiked out to the plane, and he remembers how much better it was when a new airport was built, with “jetways” that allow boarding right from the terminal.

“Having made the transition there to jetways, somewhere down the road I know how nice it’s going to be, whereas a lot of these people have never known anything but what they have. It’s going to be a shock to them, but a pleasant one.”

One person wondering if things will get worse before they get better at the airport is John Anderson of Laguna Beach, a nursing home administrator and frequent flyer, usually north to Portland, Ore., on business.

A friend dropped Anderson off in front of the terminal for a Portland flight one recent day and he breezed through check-in and security and onto the plane.

“I figured it would be a lot worse than it has been,” he said before boarding. “I wonder if as construction progresses it will get worse.” Anderson did say he makes sure to fly at off-hours when possible, and avoids peak-hour traffic on the freeways that can knot a traveler’s stomach even before getting to the airport.

“I’ve never been here during rush-hour traffic,” he said. “I’m sure it’s more hectic then.”

Alan Murphy, knee-deep in dirt some days and eyes bleary from blueprints on others, says the basic problem with the construction is simply that “we’re building a new airport on top of an existing airport. . . . No matter how much planning you do, there’s going to be problems.”

Murphy is project manager for the construction. He points out that the pre-expansion airport was built for 400,000 passengers a year and now handles more than 11 times that amount, 4.6 million a year. The biggest problem for fliers, Murphy says, is parking. One day a lot is open; the next it’s closed. But overall, “I think it’s going pretty well” during the construction.