Saturday, June 7, 1997 | 6:54 a.m.
May was to be the month that quiet would be restored to Grand Canyon National Park.
A new set of rules designed to force air tour operators to fly in smaller areas in a smaller time frame was to take effect then.
And that was only the beginning.
Eventually, backers of restoring quiet to the park hoped for much more -- even thinner slices of airspace devoted to tours, a cap on the number of flights over the canyon and restrictions on what types of aircraft could be used for the flights that take about 800,000 tourists a year over the canyon.
But air tour operators won a reprieve, convincing a judge that implementing the rules could be a recipe for disaster. Tour operators said they needed more time to properly educate pilots on new routes and procedures mandated by the revised regulations. Now, the new rules are set to take effect Jan. 31.
What began as a bid for quiet in the park has turned into cacophony in the courtroom.
The air tour industry has filed suit, saying the new rules are too restrictive. Environmentalists have countered with a suit saying the rules are too lenient.
By midweek, opening briefs are due in the case, being heard in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington. Legal teams from both sides say they are preparing their cases, and wouldn't discuss specifics.
In the meantime, a series of unrelated events are in motion that could affect the debate:
* A group has been formed to develop rules to restrict the airspace over all national parks. The National Park Overflights Working Group is expected to develop a report by the end of the summer. The goal is to develop a policy that is fair to the parks, the air tour operators and park users in the restriction of flights over the nation's federally monitored land.
One of the first parks targeted for restriction was Rocky Mountain National Park, northwest of Denver, where there are no air tours in operation. However, the air tour industry is fighting the plan, attempting to head off any precedent-setting rule.
* Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater has taken over for Federico Pena. Slater, a former highway administrator, is being lobbied by the air tour industry as a potential ally.
Industry leaders are encouraged that Slater will wage a philosophical battle at the Cabinet level -- that the Federal Aviation Administration under his department will have jurisdiction over airspace management issues instead of the Interior Department's National Park Service.
Slater's Interior Department counterpart is Bruce Babbitt, a former Arizona governor with strong economic ties to northern Arizona and the Grand Canyon region.
* Carefully and quietly, a new voice is entering the quiet canyon debate. A travel agency that specializes in ecological tours in all corners of the world is contemplating a plan to fly blimps in the Grand Canyon.
Gainesville, Fla.-based Holbrook Travel Inc. is considering the idea of providing an aerial observation platform over the world's most famous landmark, but there are still a number of hurdles to clear -- and the company won't even attempt to vault them if the political climate isn't right.
Meanwhile, a pair of North Las Vegas entrepreneurs have a new design for an airship they say would be perfect for the Grand Canyon and a business plan to get it flying. Their problem: no money to build a prototype.
The airship plan hasn't been embraced by either side of the Grand Canyon airspace debate. Air tour operators are skeptical that airships would be successful over the Grand Canyon. Environmentalists have expressed concerns about the visual impact of blimps in the canyon.
Transportation leader
Executives with the U.S. Air Tour Association recently met with new Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater and said they were encouraged that the new Cabinet appointment would take a fresh approach to the Grand Canyon airspace debate.
The USATA's approach: convincing Slater and his staff to take charge on airspace issues instead of letting land managers dictate policy.
Air tour operators maintain that the environmental movement has a Cabinet-level voice in Interior Secretary Babbitt. They feel that agencies governing land issues, such as the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, have wrested jurisdiction of the skies over land away from the Federal Aviation Administration.
"Secretary Slater was quite receptive and seemed genuinely interested in understanding our issues and concerns," said USATA President Steve Bassett of a meeting association leaders had with Slater last month.
Bassett said his association drove home the theme that "the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration must reclaim the rightful authority vested in them by Congress to manage the national aviation system and recommend national aviation policy to the president."
But the president has already spoken about his desire to create a quieter national park environment with an executive order that Babbitt has taken as a mandate to exert his authority over airspace.
The order, issued April 22, 1996 -- on Earth Day -- calls for the restoration of natural quiet to national parks. The Park Service has taken that to mean it should limit where and when air tours can operate. Some environmental groups have taken the interpretation a step further, suggesting that airplanes could be banned altogether.
The USATA maintains that wasn't the intent of the president's proclamation.
The association offered Slater an air tour of the Grand Canyon to explain its position, but the Transportation secretary, who had planned to be in Southern Nevada to tour local highway projects last week, canceled his visit.
Airship impact
Although airships appear to fit all the criteria of keeping the skies over the national parks quiet, they get no respect from any corner of the airspace debate.
Air tour operators don't claim airships among their brethren, and for good reason -- nobody flies them with commercial tours. While some high-tech dirigible designers are trying to pace a comeback for the airship, it would be a capital expense of major proportions to get one airborne. A German company recently unveiled a prototype in a new generation of airship.
Some aviation experts say it would take a minimum of two years to get a passenger airship certified in the United States with a best-case scenario. Air tour operators that have invested millions in planes and training pilots aren't about to embrace airships at this point. They'd rather fight airspace issues in court and take their chances that air corridor rulings eventually will be overturned or that a president friendlier to their cause will take office.
Environmentalists, meanwhile, aren't particularly enamored with blimps either, despite the fact that a company that specializes in eco-tours -- expeditions that are extremely sensitive to plants, animals and the environs along the route -- is exploring the feasibility of canyon airships.
"We're going through the process of the regulatory merits of using LTA (lighter than air) in the Grand Canyon environment," said Mark Van Soestbergen of Holbrook Travel. "LTA is a very viable alternative to fixed-wing and rotor craft."
Holbrook Travel, a world-renowned company founded by Giovanna Holbrook, offers expeditions to observe rain forests, fragile deserts and alpine tundra in Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, Chile and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
Van Soestbergen said Holbrook looked at the Grand Canyon as another fragile ecosystem that could best be observed from a silent perch in the sky. Holbrook's tours offer experts in their fields leading expeditions for 10 to 14 days at a time.
Airships, he said, also are being considered as observation stations above the plains of the Serengeti in Africa. Some observers there, Van Soestbergen said, motor through the landscape, threatening wildlife and wilderness.
Holbrook's primary contact for airships has been with The Lightship Group, a British subsidiary of Virgin Air with American headquarters in Orlando, Fla. It's American-based sister company is American Blimp Corp., based in Severna Park, Md., with production facilities headed by founder and president James Thiele in Oregon.
Van Soestbergen calls Thiele "a visionary," who sees the potential of blimps as a vehicle for tourists. For now, ABC builds most of its airships as outdoor advertising vehicles.
But the Sierra Club, one of the environmental organizations leading the charge against the noise generated by air tours over the Grand Canyon, isn't excited about the prospect of airships over the canyon.
"It's difficult to evaluate without some of the specifics," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club in a recent visit to Las Vegas. "Blimps could be part of the overall solution, but if you just add blimps to what we have now, you make things substantially worse."
He explained that the acceptability of airships would depend on the altitude at which they'd fly and other considerations similar to the ones imposed on fixed-wing and helicopter flights.
Randy Harness, conservation chairman of the Southern Nevada Group of the Sierra Club, was skeptical about the maneuverability of airships amid the tricky crosswinds the canyon generates as well as the noise an airship could produce.
He explained that many aircraft operate quietly under ideal conditions, but the minute the air currents begin buffeting planes around, pilots must make adjustments and rev up the engines and the full pitch turns a quiet plane into the noisy aircraft hikers object to.
Harness suspects engines on airships would be susceptible to the same problems and would become noisier as a result of the unusual weather.
Van Soestbergen said Holbrook isn't about to enter the fray if there's no hope of winning. Meanwhile, he has made contact with another blimp designer -- a North Las Vegas company that has a new airship design unlike anything in the skies today.
Michael Walden and Robert Ellingwood have formed LTAS Corp., which has designed a solar-powered rigid airship. But that's all it is right now -- a design.
Walden, the technological half of the LTAS team, has big plans and bigger dreams. Ellingwood, the business side of the equation, has been frustrated by years of doors closing in his face when searching for financial backing for the project, which would cost in excess of $1 million to build.
If they team with Holbrook and succeed in building their ship, they, too, may become part of the noisy Grand Canyon airspace debate.
archive
