The opinion article starts with a paucity of understanidng and then ignores those few facts they garnered.  One would expect them to understand that you can't put 10 pounds into a 5 pound can and that the sky above LAX will just not support unlimited growth.  What are they going to do next?  Call for the Mayor's head because traffic accidents still happen at improved intersections when drivers run red lights?  The near catastrophe--let's call it what it was--would not have been addressed by any of the actions proposed by LAWA to date!  Separating runways would not have had any impact. Runway status lights would have helped.  Improved communications and reduced controller workload would have also helped.  Gee, Times Editors, your reporters ask for facts and then you have them checked.  Is it time for yet another management shake up?  No wonder readership is going down.

Earlier operators of LAX used forethought.  The main LAX Plan document that was written in the 1970s was ignored for years.  It said that if LAX ever exceeded 40 million annual passengers the City would move operations to Palmdale were there is 17000+ acres instead of 3500.  Instead LAX has continued to grow by incremental expansions that were not looked at in a global view.  Their own Plan was regularly ignored for and finally erased by an ill conceived plan, Alternative D, that was shown by RAND and many others that it had some major flaws.  Some of Alternative D is justifyable and should be salvaged.  We tried to do that with the 2005 Settlement Agreement.  Those ideas were "GREEN LIGHT" projects as presented by surrounding community groups as early as 2002 when the Times wrote an article about their Alternative E-1.   LAWA never gave credence to that plan because of the NIH factor.  LAX could have been fixed by The Settlement Agrement a year and a half ago, and even in much earlier if LAWA had included impacted communities in any of their deliberations or even followed through with ANY of their promised mitigations.

As LAWA again pushes for more growth at LAX will a major glitch greater than last week's FAA Customs fiasco dramatically impact the financial and tourism businesses who are the ones crying foul on the agreed upon limit to the size of LAX?