TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
Brian Iler —
A small aircraft crashed Sunday evening, Sept. 29, at Santa Monica Airport in California, killing those aboard. The L.A. Times story is here.
That airport, like the Toronto Island Airport, abuts a residential area, and has been the source of controversy for years.
From the story:
Early Monday morning, David Goddard, chairman of the Santa Monica Airport Commission, estimated that the crash site was about 150 feet from residences. Had the plane not hit the hangar, it could have gone up an embankment and gotten over a wall before slamming into homes, he said.
“We’ve been attempting to get the City Council to reduce operations at the airport,” Goddard told the Los Angeles Times. The assumed fatalities “were tragic, but I was certainly grateful that it happened on the tarmac … versus off the end of the runway.”
CommunityAIR has repeatedly raised concerns about safety at the Island Airport—Rescuing passengers from an aircraft landing in Toronto Harbour or Humber Bay is compounded by deep water off the ends of the main east-west runway, and the absence of the bridge proposed by the Toronto Port Authority in 2003.
Then-TPA CEO Lisa Raitt said in a press release on Oct. 16, 2003:
“The fixed link (bridge) is a public safety issue. In the event of an emergency, it could take up to two hours to get the appropriate equipment over to the Island and that’s not acceptable.”
Porter’s Robert Deluce has dismissed bird strikes as an issue:
Mr. Deluce said the risk Porter faces from bird strikes is reduced by the type of aircraft it flies. “We’re using turboprops,” he said. “They handle bird strikes better than jets.” Globe and Mail Jan. 17 2009
However, the jets now proposed by Deluce have 73-inch diameter air intakes, far larger than the Q400 air intakes.
Iler is chair of CommunityAIR
