LAX calls in big guns to blast Palmdale solution

Editorial Focus: The worth of idea, it has been said, can be judged on the basis of its foes as well as its adherents. And based on the new opposition to Palmdale Regional Airport in the Los Angeles master plan, the Antelope Valley has moved up a step.

Carol Hallett, president and chief executive of the lobbying and legal arm of the nation's major air carriers, didn't mince words in delivering a scathing indictment of the Palmdale solution to the future of air transportation in Los Angeles County.

The good news for Palmdale in all of that is found in both the content and the tone of Hallett's message:

Both the airlines and the Los Angeles Department of Airports now recognize that using Palmdale Regional Airport is a reasonable, affordable and viable alternative to full-blown expansion of Los Angeles International Airport.

In short, Palmdale Regional Airport can no longer be ignored to death.

Palmdale must now be attacked at the highest levels by the biggest guns, lest long-suffering nearby neighbors of the old bus station called LAX rally to the relief Palmdale Regional really offers.

The verbal missiles Hallett aimed at Palmdale are not new, nor are they devastating or even well-aimed.

They are the same old hackneyed arguments that myopic, quick-buck-centered airlines have been using for years to try to prevent or forestall construction of new outlying airports to serve metropolitan areas.

The thing about airlines, it must be understood, is that they really don't like airports all that much.

More airports mean more ticket counters, and that means more people on the airline payroll. If all the flights in Southern California could be consolidated at a vastly expanded Los Angeles International, the airlines already there could do more with less - something air travelers can see firsthand on most flights.

But what airlines see as good for their bottom lines may not be so good for either the L.A. County region or the traveling public.

Air Transport Association exec Hallett, for all the ammunition expended on Palmdale, had not a word of criticism for the potentially disastrous expansion of LAX.

And since her association has been aggressively suing the city of L.A. for years over tripling of landing fees at LAX, one has to wonder what prompted her timely attentions to Palmdale?

Whatever the motive, the "nobodies" who live "way out here" - all 350,000 of us - should be gratified that at long last Palmdale Regional Airport has risen to the level of a credible threat to the powers that be in Los Angeles City Hall and at the Department of Airports.

Now, it would seem, we have even larger foes.

Perhaps next the Department of Airports will bring in as surrogate gunslinger the Airline Pilots Association to explain why pilots would rather circle the terminal in a doubly-crowded sky over LAX than get a quick clearance into Palmdale Regional.

That would be wonderful indeed.

Fire when ready, Department of Airports. The Palmdale solution can take the heat.