Sounding Off:

There is something decidedly disquieting about Joe Bell’s The Bell Curve (“Airport’s change for the worse,” Oct 15).

He calls for a goal to stop expansion of John Wayne Airport while raising the level of discourse about permanent curfew and passenger caps.

His argument is based on a $652-million terminal improvement, but he ignores the land-locked nature of dinky John Wayne Airport which can not grow much even if caps were abandoned, and he assumes the airplanes always will depart over Newport Beach, a big mistake in the initial design of that airport. We need the settlement agreement, which makes life livable around here, but Bell’s call for constraint is a threat to our security.

I would like to see John Wayne Airport closed to commercial traffic.

Long established familiar patterns of doing things wrong do not give it the superficial sanction of being right. We have a bay and city to protect, two future quiet zones, and they’re not going away. Getting rid of the airplanes should be a high priority for Bell and Air Fair, to which he refers.

Here are just a few items of mitigation. Airport usage dropped from 10 million annual passengers to 9 million annual passengers during the last year and there is reason to believe this trend may continue.

The environmental movement reigns supreme, and passenger airplanes are gross polluters, so only international traffic can survive, but JWA’s runway is too short for that.

When John Wayne Airport was designed, it interfered with nearby El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, so the FAA had to overlap the five-mile circles centered over the airports.

Now El Toro is closed and its air space is available for John Wayne Airport which the FAA quickly adopted for Santa Ana wind conditions with northerly reverse flow departures and a sharp right turn over Irvine and out to the coast over open space.

JWA’s runway runs down hill to the north so heavier planes can take off that way.

So far Irvine has not complained. They’re still fighting El Toro International Airport and haven’t noticed that John Wayne Airport is a clear and present danger.

When the weather is calm, which it is 35% of the time, JWA flights can use the Santa Ana wind reverse flow departure over Irvine instead of over Newport Beach, and this should be a priority.

DONALD NYRE lives in Newport Beach