Organ Transport Service’s Video Angers Van Nuys Airport’s Critics

The operator of one of the busiest organ transport services on the West Coast and anti-noise homeowners around Van Nuys Airport are at odds over the homeowners’ desire to revoke the ambulance service’s exemption from nighttime noise limits.

Alan Chatfield, chief operating officer of Chatfield Air Ambulance, said limiting his firm to newer, quieter jets that comply with the noise restrictions could, in some cases, make it impossible to transport donor organs fast enough to save lives.

The noise protesters say they are not opposed to the flights but to the use of older, noisier jets.

Chatfield’s firm arranges as many as three flights a day to airports throughout the United States and Canada to obtain donor organs for infant heart transplants at Loma Linda University Medical Center near Redlands, liver transplants at UCLA Medical Center in Westwood and heart transplants at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

He said his firm’s flights account for most of the complaints about nighttime aircraft noise registered at the airport.

$35,000 to Produce Video

To counter what he said was growing homeowner group opposition, Chatfield and three other commercial aviation tenants at Van Nuys Airport spent $35,000 to produce a 24-minute video defending the airport’s importance in transporting donor organs.

The video, which features scenes from organ transplant operations, includes a plea to Van Nuys residents from the head of the Loma Linda University Medical Center infant heart transplant program.

“I and other members of the medical community are alarmed . . . that Van Nuys Airport might be closed to nighttime traffic,” said Dr. Leonard L. Bailey in the video.

“If Van Nuys residents agree to close the airport from 10 o’clock on, that will simply translate into babies dying, in very real terms. We’ll lose organs and lose recipients, and finally it will result in lives lost.”

‘Reconsider Their Agenda’

Bailey, famous for his 1984 transplant of a baboon heart into the infant known as “Baby Faye,” asked Van Nuys residents to “reconsider their agenda to try and limit the usefulness” of the airport.

That plea, which became public when the video was shown Wednesday at a Van Nuys meeting of the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners, outraged the leaders of two leading anti-noise groups. They said they have not sought to include emergency medical flights in the nighttime takeoff and landing ban that is their goal.

Emergency flights are exempt from city restrictions, which bar takeoffs between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. by planes that produce more than 74 decibels of noise.

Although representatives of the two leading anti-airport noise groups said they have no objections to emergency flights during the curfew hours, both said their groups want the flights to be subject to the restrictions.

The video “was a very cheap shot,” said Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino and a leading airport critic. “If they continue to use that kind of strategy, it’s going to create a most negative reaction, and the homeowners may eventually say, ‘Take your aircraft out of here.’ ”

He said continuing nighttime emergency medical flights are not threatened by his group’s opposition, which is to use of the older, noisier jets, not to the flights themselves.

“The issue is one of economics,” he said. “What they really want to do is fly the oldest, noisiest equipment possible, and we’re just saying, ‘Hey, if you are going to have these kinds of flights, use proper equipment.’ ”

Don Schultz, president of Ban Airport Noise, a coalition of homeowner groups, was also angered by the video.

“At no time has my organization or any organization I represent . . . ever said ‘Close the airport down to emergency operations at any hour of the day or night,’ ” Schultz said. “I resent the implication, and I feel it is a pointed form of propaganda to show that we are unreasonable and uncaring people.”

But Chatfield said some homeowner group representatives have talked about an absolute ban on night flights.

Even subjecting the night flights to the current noise restrictions would make it difficult for his firm to provide timely organ transportation, he said. The number of quieter jets is insufficient, and it would not be economical for aircraft leasing firms to buy the newer jets, he said.

Chatfield said the 500-m.p.h. Lear 20 jets that homeowner group leaders object to are “more commonly available, more reliable and the best tool available for the job” of flying donor organs to Van Nuys for helicopter transfer to the three large hospitals that are his most frequent customers.

Only half of the 10 jets available from leasing firms at Van Nuys Airport would comply with the airport’s nighttime noise restriction, Chatfield said. Some of the quieter jets are slower and cost $2.5 million apiece or more. As a result, Chatfield said, leasing firms would operate smaller fleets, which would mean that enough planes might not be available.

“All we were trying to do is educate the community and that’s apparently what struck a nerve,” Chatfield said. “It wasn’t our intent to annoy, upset or offend anybody.”