Modern Pressures on El Monte Airfield Sour Romance of Flying

Dean Cayot remembers when El Monte Airport was little more than a landing strip on a stretch of sandy riverbed, surrounded by dairy farms.

“There was a dairy right there where the tower is,” said the flight instructor, pointing at the airport’s squat tower, topped by the usual glassed-in air traffic control center. “The farmer didn’t like the airport, so he used to pile bales of hay down at the end of the runway. Every once in a while, his cows would break out, so you’d come in to find a runway full of cows.”

The scene at El Monte Airport, a 103-acre stretch of open ground wedged between Santa Anita Avenue and the Rio Hondo Flood Control Wash, often still has a sleepy, rural quality. With a single 4,000-foot north-south runway, the field sees little of the hectic, split-second airborne choreography of an urban airport.

But the county-owned general aviation facility, catering mostly to private fliers, has progressed far beyond the pasture days.

“This little field really pops sometimes,” said air traffic controller Ira Wright.

When Santa Anita Park is open, with the high-rollers winging into the area from across the state, and when law enforcement officers are on the prowl in the San Gabriel Valley in their helicopters, the El Monte runway has been known to handle as many as 125 takeoffs and landings in an hour.

“It’s been called one of the busiest airports per square foot,” said Fred Berry, supervisor of the control tower.

Cayot, 64, a short, tightly packed man with an iron-gray crew cut, leans against a car at the opening of a big hangar belonging to Alpine Aviation, one of three flight instruction and airplane maintenance firms on the field, and considers how El Monte Airport has changed since he first started flying there 25 years ago.

A forest of little private planes, an assortment of high-winged Cessnas and low-winged Pipers, spreads across the Tarmac next to the taxiway. Long, low hangars, laid out in a row like Army barracks, parade toward the far end of the field.

“When I first came here, there wasn’t a building that’s here now,” Cayot said.

A Cessna Citation jet, a small corporate airplane that California Edison uses to transport its executives around the state, suddenly swoops down the runway and, with a high-pitched whistle, roars off to the east.

Private jets, and the noise they make, are another recent development, said Cayot. “Like all the rest of the world,” he said, “things get more complex as it goes around.”

Complex and nettlesome. As with small fields everywhere, the turning world has brought troubles to freedom-loving private pilots.

Not only is the recent economic picture for the general aviation industry depressed--as are, consequently, prospects for expanded business at the airport--but private pilots in El Monte must contend with adversaries including edgy federal regulators, soaring fuel prices, smog and neighbors complaining about noise.

You get used to the grinding motors of the little single-engine planes, grouses William Dohman, president of the tenants association at Daleview Mobile Estates, a development for senior citizens north of the airport. “It’s the big planes,” he said. “They’re very noisy. They have to get down so low to have enough space to stop. It drowns everything out.” And the helicopters--they really churn things up, he added. “Some people complain that, as the helicopters go over, the chimes in their clocks go off,” he said.

The airport management and pilots who use the airport have devised a noise abatement procedure that directs planes away from residential areas, advising pilots to follow the flood control channel that skirts the western edge of the runway. And circling planes are directed by air traffic controllers into a pattern 1,000 feet above the airport, instead of the customary 800.

Big signs near both ends of the runway, where airplanes rev up their motors before taking off, spell out the departure procedure, complete with diagrams and arrows.

Airport Manager Gary Harshman goes to the south end to show how it works. He points at a Cessna 150 churning down the runway and lofting toward Orange County. “See, he’s making a slight right turn,” he said, as the airplane follows the westward meander of the flood control channel, veering away from a residential neighborhood south of Valley Boulevard. “That’s all it is.”

But some complain that the procedures are regularly violated. “They don’t live up to it at all,” said Cloyd Brackney, another Daleview resident.

Others said it’s not the noise that bothers them but the danger. “It never bothered me until a couple of years ago, when all the airplanes started falling out of the sky,” said Lee Mendoza, who has lived on Bessie Avenue, west of the airport, for 28 years.

Harshman insists that there is better than 90% compliance with the noise abatement procedure. “If you have a brand new student, it might be difficult for him,” he said. “Or maybe somebody from out of town. But most comply.”

Nagging disputes between airport and neighbors, whose homes crowd the field on all sides, have been going on for so long that there’s a ritual quality to it. “They call up and say, ‘The planes are knocking the pictures off my wall,’ ” said one battle-hardened air traffic controller. “You want to say, ‘Get bigger nails.’ But you have to be polite.”

But the city, and its leaders, appear to have accepted the continued existence of the airport (although one city official says privately, “If the airport wasn’t there, that would be a heck of a piece of property to develop.”).

More worrisome to airport administrators and private pilots is the sputtering state of the general-aviation industry. The airport’s business has eroded in recent years, and the county is considering leasing it to a private firm. A combination of high fuel costs (about $1.75 a gallon for “100 low lead” at the airport fuel station), rising insurance premiums, sticker shock for airplane buyers and high rental costs have cut down on airport operations, county administrators say.

“In 1970, you could rent a plane for $13 an hour,” said Cayot, who ran the field’s Piper dealership for 13 years before high costs forced him out of business. “Now, the same plane will cost you $45 an hour.”

Although El Monte has always been a profitable airport, with income last year of more than $500,000, business in the county is stagnant, county officials say. Ten years ago, during the heyday of general aviation in Southern California, El Monte registered 235,000 takeoffs and landings a year. This year, Harshman said, the airport may not crack 190,000.

What this means for private pilots is the likelihood of dealing with a private contractor on the field, and paying higher fees for hangar space and tie-down rights. “From conversations we’ve had (with county officials), we figure it’s probably 50-50” that the airport will go private, said Dennis Robinson, president of the 100-member San Gabriel Valley Pilots Assn.

More troublesome still for many pilots are increasing restrictions on where they can fly and what kind of equipment they’ll be required to have.

Tricky Location

The 55-year-old airport, one of two in the San Gabriel Valley (the other is Brackett Field in La Verne), is wedged between the San Gabriel Mountains and the terminal control area, the broad chute of airspace through which the big westbound jet airliners travel to Los Angeles International Airport.

That makes the Federal Aviation Administration nervous. Wright, during a slow period in the control tower, points out the big picture on a map. Three miles off the southern end of the El Monte runway, over Legg Lake, is the edge of the terminal control area, whose lower extremity at that point is at 2,500 feet.

“It’s not that big a factor, unless someone’s doing something they’re not supposed to be doing,” said Wright.

But federal bureaucrats, with the nightmare of a 1986 collision between an Aeromexico DC-9 and a private plane over Cerritos still vivid, are doing everything they can to make sure that kind of accident does not happen again. For example, the FAA may soon require all airplanes flying out of El Monte to be equipped with a special altimeter that can be read via a radar signal by air traffic controllers. The minimum cost, said Robinson, will be about $700.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” said one pilot, “if your normal pattern doesn’t take you anywhere near LAX.”

Yesterday’s Pace

Problems such as these have taken away some of the romance of flying, pilots complain. “Maybe there was more camaraderie in the past,” said Cayot. “There were more people standing around, kicking dirt and doing hangar flying. More people sat around on the weekends and talked about flying than actually flew.”

Many complain that the airport lacks a terminal and restaurant to serve as a focus for airport life. “Pilots will fly in and ask you, ‘Now, where’s the restaurant?’ ” said air traffic controller Cherie Conners. “When you tell them there is none, they turn around and fly right back out.”

Cayot, for one, isn’t sure that the airport’s lack of “hangar fliers” is such a bad thing. “Sure, I miss (the old days), though you get so you know all the stories backwards,” he said. “But there are two sides to it. It’s nice to have camaraderie and friends, but it wastes a lot of time.”

Robert Dentice, a bustling man who works as mechanic and pilot, has been a fixture at the airport since the early 1970s. The FAA, with all of its new restrictions on private planes, is going into overkill, said Dentice vehemently, as he poked with a wrench at the motor of a small single-engine airplane in his small hangar.

“If you don’t want risk, stay in your bedroom and hope there’s no fire or earthquake,” he said. Dentice, 58, is one of three master mechanics at the airport who work as FAA inspectors.

But Dentice doesn’t buy the death-of-romance arguments. “When you break out on top of the clouds and--how does the poem go?--’slip the surly bonds of earth,’ it never fails to promote an emotion,” he said. “The romance and awe are still there.”

Then Dentice, who flies to El Monte daily from his home in Crestline, in the San Bernardino Mountains, thinks about commuting. “When you’re following the 210 Freeway at 120 m.p.h., looking down at all the red (brake) lights down there,” he said, “that’s another kind of emotion.”