PACOIMA — Whiteman Airport is a place where motorists still drive out onto the taxiway and where controllers operate without radar. When the last tower worker departs in the evening, he leaves the runway lights on.
Whiteman is also one of the fastest-growing airports in the region, a booming profit center where 300 new hangars are planned--with 50 to be built this year--to reduce a waiting list of two years.
But as the once-isolated country airport emerges into a turbulent new era, it has acquired a different sort of notoriety: a significantly high number of accidents.
Eight have occurred in the last three years, including three double fatalities, according to a review of National Transportation Safety Board records. Each involved a pilot departing or arriving at Whiteman, accident reports show.
That record has alarmed some political leaders, who have questioned just how safe the airport is, a question that sends shivers up the spines of aviation enthusiasts fearful of losing yet another landing field, which are disappearing nationally at a rate of one per week.
Whiteman's two much-larger neighbors have far better safety records, the files show. Van Nuys Airport, the busiest general aviation airport in the world with six times as much air traffic as Whiteman, had 13 accidents in three years, with two fatalities. In the same period, three accidents with no fatalities were reported at the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport, which has double the number of operations as Whiteman.
Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon last spring called for a safety investigation into the county-owned airport.
"The airspace in the San Fernando Valley is very busy, with three airports in close proximity and the many aircraft that transition over or through this area," county Public Works Director Harry W. Stone responded. "Three or four of the . . . accidents were happenstance in relation to Whiteman Airport." Although arguing that several of the incidents cited by Alarcon should not be attributed to Whiteman, Stone acknowledged that its rate of accidents "seems excessive."
A 1990 county-sponsored study of the airport noted "a relatively high number of incidents" at Whiteman that it blamed on the predominance of recreational and flight-training operations. That report cited more than one accident per year at Whiteman between 1979 and 1990, a rate that a spokesman for a national pilots group said is typical of similar-size airports.
