An Airport Goes to Bed--but Travelers Have the Nightmares

Felisa Bill, who lives only a block from Orange County’s John Wayne Airport, had just packed up her two small children and made a mad midnight dash to Los Angeles International Airport. Yet there was a happy glow on her face. LAX never looked sweeter.

“I made it,” she said as she rushed up to her husband, David, moments after he got off United Airlines Flight 321 from San Francisco.

The reason Felisa had to drive a speedy half-hour in the middle of the night to pick up David is the reason LAX sometimes turns into a haven for displaced persons. The reason is not Christmas or any other holiday, or anything having to do with LAX itself. It’s the 11 p.m. curfew imposed by John Wayne Airport, a fact of life that often slaps unsuspecting late-night travelers in the face, forcing them to land at LAX and then take a bus to John Wayne.

As a Long Beach resident, living roughly between the two airports, I had never thought about the curfew-- until I tried getting home on Flight 321 on a recent Thursday night.

I watched as Felisa Bill, 25, fighting to catch her breath, came to an abrupt halt in front of her 27-year-old husband, who works for a Los Angeles environmental services firm. She had raced to LAX after receiving his phone call telling her our flight would barely miss the curfew.

“I was driving across the airport bridge when I saw your plane land,” Felisa told David. She had left their two children, 3 1/2 months and 4 1/2 years, outside the terminal with their grandfather. “I didn’t think I would make it.”

It’s easy to be forgiving when you are in your 20s and life is still an adventure. Not so for the rest of us. We still had another wait, then a long bus ride to Orange County ahead of us.

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Many small Southland airports have restrictions on takeoffs and landings, but the two largest, LAX and Ontario, have minimal limitations. Ontario, roughly the size of John Wayne, restricts noise by controlling the types of aircraft allowed to land and by directing flights toward less densely populated areas after 10 p.m. Burbank Airport does not schedule takeoffs and landings after 10 p.m. but gives some flexibility to late incoming flights. (“We believe diverting flights causes a greater disservice to people than the damage caused by a one-time noise event,” a spokesman says.)

The more rigid Orange County curfew is part of a 1985 settlement reached by the airport, residents and the city of Newport Beach.

It reduces noise pollution and makes residents happy. But for travelers who would not suspect such a rule in a busy metropolitan area, it’s a different matter.

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A combination of rain, late flights and the curfew turned Flight 321 from San Francisco into a four-hour ordeal.

When your Orange County-bound plane misses the 11 p.m. curfew, as United’s would, the airline drops you off at LAX with directions on how to find a bus that will take you to John Wayne.

Some, like David Bill, make other arrangements. (Felisa happened to call United after the plane took off and got the news.) Others must deal with it, though not happily.

We didn’t learn that our plane would not be able to make the curfew until we were sitting on the San Francisco runway. The flight attendants had shown up late, missing the scheduled 9:10 p.m. departure time by more than an hour.

“You can get off now and catch an early flight tomorrow morning,” said a flight attendant named Kristen while the plane was on the ground.

“Will you put us up at a hotel [in San Francisco]?” asked Kyle Cook, 36, of Seattle. He was on his way to a four-day vacation to Disneyland with his wife, sister-in-law, mother and three small children. Now he was kicking himself for not flying into Los Angeles in the first place. Except during rush hour, it’s about a 40-minute drive from one airport to the other.

“Sorry,” said Kristen, vigorously shaking her head no. (Her eyes seemed to say, Are you kidding?) “We promised to get you to Orange County and we will” . . . albeit by bus.

Cook was fuming at what was happening to his vacation. “All I’ve been getting all day are smart-ass answers,” he said.

He and his family had left Seattle at 10 that morning. Because of bad weather, they had missed their 1:30 p.m. connecting flight in San Francisco by 10 minutes. Then they were put on standby and sat around all afternoon and into the evening in San Francisco waiting for a flight. Their bags left for John Wayne at 4 p.m. The car rental agency they were going to use at John Wayne would close at 11 p.m. Their hotel’s airport shuttle service would also stop running by the time they got to John Wayne, forcing the seven of them to squeeze into a cab (probably two cabs) to get to their hotel.

So there the Cooks were, standing with dozens of other passengers at the curb at LAX shortly after midnight, waiting for the two charter buses that United Airlines had promised would take them to Orange County.

The passengers were prepared for the worst, which was that the buses wouldn’t show. No one from United had accompanied the group from the plane.

“The buses have nine [more] minutes to be on time. What chance do you think we have of that happening?” a businessman standing in the crowd with the Cooks asked rhetorically. “Slim and none.”

Cracked another: “Time to spare? Go by air.”

But the buses did arrive, and by 1 a.m. they rolled to a stop in front of John Wayne’s statue.

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The only ones happy seemed to be the cabbies waiting there.

As for the Cooks, the first batch of cabs filled up and were gone by the time they tracked down their baggage and made it back to curbside in the early morning darkness.

They had some more waiting ahead of them.