Palo Alto City Council

City of Palo Alto

Palo Alto , CA 94301
Cc: County Supervisors, James Keene,
Menlo Park City Council, San Mateo Supervisors,
PAUSD, Mountain View City Council

Subject: Closure of the Palo Alto Airport (PAO)

Elected Public Officials:

Time To Shut Down Palo Alto Airport!

The crash of a small, two-engine aircraft on February 17, 2010, while taking off from the
Palo Alto Airport, killed the plane’s three occupants, and blacked out all of Palo Alto and
portions of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park. This crash greatly reinforces the argument
that the that aviation is inherently unsafe--and that people who live near the near airports
are at the mercy of people (pilots) they do not know, have no reason to trust, and who
may even use their aircraft as weapons of suicide and destruction, as did an Austin,
Texas, resident the next day after the Palo Alto crash.

In this case, the pilot turned a $300 business expense for commercial airline tickets into a
$50M-$75M+ Local/Federal loss—a loss that must be borne by over 100,000 local
residents, homeowners and businesses and US taxpayers. The table below attempts to
provide a "straw man" estimate of the financial losses that might be suffered from this
power outage--caused by the crash of this aircraft:

Estimate of One-Day Economic Loss Due To 02.17.10 Power Outage

Item Item Cost Per-Unit Units Unit Type
Lost Individual
Productivity/Salaries $50,000,000 500 100,000 People/Salary-Per-Day
Lost Corporate Deliveries/Sales $10,000,000 10,000,000 1 Companies
Lost Retail Sales $10,000,000 10,000,000 1 Sales Outlets
Lost Sales Tax $905,000 905,000 1 Sales Outlets
PA Utility Lost Revenues $1,000,000 1,000,000 1 Accounts
PG&E Lost Revenues $200,000 200,000 1 Accounts
Lost Homes/Personal Property $2,000,000 2,000,000 1 Homes
Vehicles Destroyed $90,000 30,000 3 Vehicles
Ruined Food/Perishable
Inventories $1,000,000 1,000,000 1 Businesses/Homes
Repair Costs (Materials and
Labor) $300,000 300,000 1 Various
FAA/TSB
Investigation/Involvement $2,000,000 2,000,000 1 Labor/Travel/Etc.
Homeowner Insurance Increases ??? ??? ??? Homes
Fire Insurance Increases ??? ??? ??? Homes
PAO Insurance Increase $1,000,000 50,000 20 Airport(s)/Years/dollars
Local Emergency Responses ??? ??? ??? People/Salaries
Costs
Future Lost Personal Productivity ??? ??? ??? Productivity/Salaries
Legal Representation Costs ??? ??? ??? Clients/Contact Hours
Law Suit Resolutions ??? ??? ??? Clients/Settlements/Verdicts
Other ??? ??? ??? To Be Determined
Grand Total: $78,495,000

Note -- This is an unofficial estimate. Actual costs to Palo Alto, the County Government and the Federal
Government are unknown, and may never be known, due to various levels of government
secrecy/delays/non-responsiveness to Freedom of Information requests/CA Public Information Requests.
Other dollar values, such as lost sales--can never be known due to there being no reporting mechanism
for these sorts of losses due to power outages from the Palo Alto Utility (PAU).

(While this estimate only includes business and personal liability from activities here in
Palo Alto, it does not include any losses that might be associated with the deaths of the
plane's occupants--which could easily be in the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars
for Silicon Valley employees and business owners.)

Other Scenarios

While the actual total incident cost for the 02.17.10 crash may never be known, are there
other possibilities about this, or other possible airplane crashes, that local governments
should be considering? Certainly a plane associated with the Palo Alto Airport could
have hit the nearby water treatment plant, and possibly disabling/destroying it, or could
have hit a school or the Stanford Campus, killing perhaps upwards of a hundred (or more)
students. In those situations, what backup plans do each of these local governing
agencies have to respond to the situation? While PG&E was able to correct the damage
to its high-voltage feed into Palo Alto rather quickly, how long would it take the City of
Palo Alto to rebuild its water treatment plant, should it be destroyed as a result of an
airplane crashing into the facility, or the PAUSD to rebuild a destroyed school?

And who becomes financial responsible for repairs, rebuilding, or settlements to lawsuits
about “wrongful death” that will invariably follow such events? In the case of a Palo
Alto Airport-based plane crashing into a local school, would the school district be
responsible (meaning ultimately the PAUSD taxpayers)? Given the high costs for
repair/rebuilding/legal costs associated with plane crashes in the Palo Alto/Menlo
Park/Stanford area, who is ultimately responsible for the damages incurred when such a
crash happens on private property, like the HP facility? Would the County as the Palo
Alto Airport’s operator, with its deep pockets, immediately become the major respondent
in all lawsuits (again meaning the taxpayers of Santa Clara County)? Could a very smart
litigation lawyer find ways to bind the City of Palo Alto into such a lawsuit, because of
sloppy legal work done decades ago—when the City made this property available to the
County as the Airport’s operator?

While doubtless most government agencies have outside insurance that might pay some
of these damage claims, can any of our elected officials guarantee us that the taxpayers
will not eventually have to subsidize not only the airports, but the damage that the pilots
incur when landing, or taking off, from these airports? And could Palo Alto’s become
liable for tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars of damages for what might end up
being a “pilot error”? How does each and every property tax payer in Palo Alto, and
perhaps Santa Clara, when seeing his/her property tax bill go up in order to pay off the
bonds that would have to be sold to settle such a law suit, come to see that subsidizing
these airports is a “benefit to the community”?

Personal/Airport Liability?

None of the local newspapers running articles about this crash have raised the issue of
personal liability of the plane’s owner, and pilot. There seems to be no sense that liability
is even an issue here—given the large number of column-inches devoted to the presumed
pilot, column-inches which seem to be more romanticizing him, than asking hard
questions about the personal and Airport Operator liability for such events. While most
Airports carry liability insurance in the $50M-$100M range, has anyone in the local Press
inquired of the Airport operators how much liability insurance the Palo Alto Airport
carries, and under what conditions, and to what extent, the Airport is liable for the
damages incurred by these sorts of crashes?

Should Government (meaning the County Supervisors and the local elected officials) be
proactively guarding the safety of the non-flying public by demanding that the highest
amount of Airport Liability insurance be carried, and those costs shared by the pilots,
rather than perhaps showing nothing by disinterest about this matter of pilot/Airport
liability insurance? I know I would like to know how much 3rd-party liability insurance
each pilot is required to carry before they are allowed to use an airport in Santa Clara
County?

And of course, there is the nagging question about what constitutes “safe conditions” for
a take off, and which government agency is responsible for setting these standards, and
enforcing these standards. Should the FAA (US Taxpayers) be liable for crashes that
occur at Airports under its control?

Government Has Obligation To Protect Residents

People who live in Palo Alto have a right to go to work, and not come home to a house
that is burned out, and perhaps a family that is dead, because a “pilot” made a judgment
in error. The Government of Palo Alto is currently helping to subsidize a handful of
people who have not been the best neighbors, over the long, tortured and unsuccessful
financial history of the Palo Alto Airport--while ignoring the safety of 99.999% of its
residents and businesses. Moreover, the County, as this Airport’s operator, is seemingly
doing virtually nothing to insure Palo Alto resident’s safety either,

Back in the 1930s, the College Park residents were in the process of suing Stanford about
the nuisance of its air strip when the current location in the Baylands was made available
to the pilots by pro-aviation public officials and business leaders. While this was a good
location in the 1930s, it no longer is. It is time to move the flight operations for this
airstrip somewhere else. Simply looking the other way is not going to increase the safety
of the flight operations of this facility, nor is it going to insure that no more accidents
occur there (about 80 accidents have occurred at this location in the past 30-odd years,
according to FAA accident tracking data. Most of these accidents are “pilot error”.

Conclusion

This special treatment of this one group (the pilots) has got to stop. It is past time to shut
down this Airport, moving its operations to other local Airports, such as San Carlos
and/or possibly using some of the now-mostly-idle Moffett Field. While this might be
inconvenient to perhaps eighty Palo Alto residents, it will increase both the quality of life
and the safety of living in our town for the 60,000 others of us who are non-pilots, and
the 90,000-100,000 people who work in Palo Alto.

Each and every time an aircraft takes off, or lands, there is a significant risk of this sort of
thing happening again. It’s time to shut down this Airport and recognize that the purpose
of Government is the security of the majority, not the underwriting of expensive pastimes
of the few.

Wayne Martin
Palo Alto, CA