Amidst increased controversy following two recent crashes within the past few months, Whiteman Airport held its annual family and community festival, inviting the public to learn more about the facility and the field of aviation.
Hundreds of visitors came out to the tarmac on June 27, where dozens of aircraft that are housed at Whiteman were on display, giving them an up-close look. These included the standard single-engine planes, but also two-seat gyrocopters and large aircraft utilized by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL Fire).
Children were given the chance not only to see the planes but to take to the sky with free flights. The airport’s Young Eagles program acquaints youngsters with flying by giving them free rides.
Whiteman offers various aviation programs and flying lessons to teens that include their Civil Air Patrol (CAP) Squadron and Kitty Hawk Squadron 3. The airport has specialized flight schools and aviation programs for those seeking pilot licenses.
Families toured a hangar and saw the frame of a small airplane built through the Youth Build Program, where teens construct an aircraft under the mentorship of experts from the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Chapter 40. Once the craft is completed, they’ll be given the chance to fly the plane as well.
There were more than a dozen resource booths containing information about aviation from nonprofits and organizations, including the Latino Professionals in Aerospace, California Drone Academy and Whiteman Airport Coalition. More information was available through the handful of seminars the airport hosted, which discussed topics like aviation careers and pathways.
EAA Chapter 40 President Clyde Carpenter said the goal of this event is for people to feel inspired and excited about the opportunities available at Whiteman and the possibilities for aviation careers.
“I want [our guests] to know that they can do it,” Carpenter said. “That’s the first thing because they get presented [with] a lot of barriers that are honestly self-imposed or imposed by people who just don’t understand, so the biggest thing is to share with the youth that they can chase those dreams.”
While the event focused on the positives the airport brings to the community, the controversy surrounding the facility persists. For years, the nonprofit organization Pacoima Beautiful, with area politicians, including Los Angeles City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez and county Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, have called for its closure, alleging the site poses an environmental and safety risk to the community.
Those calls were renewed in April when a plane crash-landed in the parking lot of an O’Reilly Auto Parts store in Pacoima, striking a utility pole and clipping a high-voltage power line along the way. Then, on June 16, just under two weeks before the festival, a crash occurred within the airport. A pilot was landing on the runway when the landing gear reportedly didn’t deploy properly, and the plane barreled through the perimeter fence before coming to a stop in the parking lot.
The pilots in both instances survived and were the only reported injuries. Nonetheless, officials called for a halt to operations due to safety concerns.
On June 30, the LA County Board of Supervisors directed staff to move forward with a series of recommendations aimed at boosting safety at Whiteman, including pilot safety seminars. Horvath said that according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), each crash at Whiteman for the past 20 years was caused by either pilot error or aircraft malfunction.
“It’s absolutely unacceptable for community members to live in fear without answers as to why these things are happening and … that these are really related to pilot and operational error, not to the county’s lack of maintenance of a facility [or] lack of jurisdiction in terms of taking our authority seriously,” Horvath said. “These are issues that we really want to seriously address.”
The Whiteman Airport Coalition, made up of pilots, members of the local business and aviation community, opposes the efforts to close the airport and maintains the county has not invested in Whiteman and said the county should be pursuing available grant money from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to make airport improvements.
Whiteman was built in 1946 as a private facility, but in 1970 the property was purchased by the County of LA and transitioned into a public use airport.
When asked about the moves to close Whiteman, Carpenter responded, “We’re happy to have the opportunity to share what we do with this community, and we hope that they will find benefit in what we’re doing. If we can focus on what we’re doing, we can do it really well and make a difference in the community in a very positive way.”
Aviation Community Weighs in
Chris Cappiello is a student pilot, as well as the son of a pilot, who has been around Whiteman off and on his whole life. He and his father were at Whiteman’s festival to display their Comanche aircraft, answer questions from visitors and give them a peek inside the cockpit.
Cappiello said that events like these introduce the idea to people that aviation is something they can pursue and do for a living, and having an airport like Whiteman in the community not only brings with it job opportunities, but also provides a home for emergency response teams, including CAL Fire, to deploy from in case of a disaster. Media helicopters also utilize the airport.
One attendee, who went by his initials B.G., is an A&P (airframe and powerplant) mechanic who maintains and repairs aircraft. He came to the festival with his two daughters, who already had some experience with flying, to look at the various booths and join in the various activities, including taking a short flight through the Young Eagles program.
“Airports usually have a lot of different jobs [on site], from maintenance to pilots, instructors and students,” B.G. said and because he hasn’t lived in the area long, so he couldn’t say whether Whiteman should be shut down, but he thinks that having an airport in any city is a resource; how much benefit it provides the community depends on how it’s managed, how it’s used and how it makes revenue.
Having grown up in the aviation field, Cappiello said he doesn’t believe that flying is any more dangerous or accident-prone than the roads that see thousands of cars pass by each day.
“I think there’s just more attention when there’s a plane crash … [because] it’s not something that happens every day, so it just draws more attention,” Cappiello said. “But as far as the risk to the public, I don’t think it’s any more or less than all the big trucks driving down the roads and just getting to where they need to go every day. There’s a risk to everything, and I don’t think the airport poses any more risk than anything else.”