"Airport Land Use: More Mather mess: Housing too near runway impedes extension"

Sunday, September 9, 2001

Editorial
More Mather mess: Housing too near runway impedes extension
The Sacramento (CA) Bee


This really happened. Last month, an Airborne Express cargo jet landing
at Mather Airport about 6 a.m. hit a bird. As required in all such
cases, mechanics were called in to check the aircraft for damage. It
took them several hours to finish their inspection. In those several
hours, county workers moved onto Mather's main runway to perform
regularly scheduled maintenance.

When the jet was ready to take off again, the main runway was
unavailable and the jet had to use Mather's second, shorter runway. But
it was August and temperatures had risen. The inflexible rules of
aerodynamics dictate that the hotter the temperatures, the thinner the
air, and therefore the more get up and go (runway) a jet needs to take
off. Mather's backup runway is only 6,100 feet long, not long enough to
allow a jet carrying 70,000 pounds of cargo to take off when
temperatures rise and air thins. So Airborne had to offload 20,000
pounds of cargo and reroute trucks to other airports in the Bay Area at
a cost of several thousand dollars in just that one day.

That real-life story, recited for Sacramento County supervisors who are
weighing Mather's future, sums up why cargo operators at Mather want the
county to lengthen the airport's second runway. A backup runway would
give them the assurance they need that an accident on the main runway or
regular maintenance or a bird strike would not throw their operations
off schedule. Several national cargo operators, including UPS, are
looking at Mather as a possible regional hub, which would bring an
estimated 220 additional jobs to the region immediately and 690 over the
next 20 years. But cargo operators who want to invest at Mather hesitate
because there is no adequate backup runway.

So why not lengthen the runway? Because county supervisors approved the
construction of Zinfandel Villages, a 1,500-unit housing development
right next to the airport. A second runway would bring jet noise too
close to the houses, approved but not yet built. There is an
alternative. The county could build a new backup runway to the south of
the main runway. But that would cost $100 million, twice the amount it
would cost to extend the current backup runway.

The constraint Zinfandel Villages poses on runway expansion is only one
of its many problems. Even without the longer second runway, state
airport safety officials have told the local school district it may not
build an elementary school in the development because it's too close to
an airport and therefore too noisy and too dangerous.

The decision by the supervisors to allow developers to build housing so
close to Mather looks more foolish by the day.

Visit the California Aviation Alliance Airport Land-Use Forum at:
 
http://www.californiaaviation.org/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?az=list&fo
rum=DCForumID13&conf=DCConfID7

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