THE ECONOMY FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD RUNWAY

If the runway is where I think it is,” says Kingston Yong of Irving, “then my back yard will be concrete.” Yong, like many Irvingites, is worried about the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, which wants to add two new north-south runways. One, on the west side, will point directly at downtown Grapevine. And the one on the Irving side will go through or very near Yong’s Harrington Heights neighborhood. “We’re right in the barrel of the gun,” says Yong, president of a neighborhood association that represents about seventy-five homes in a $150,000 to $300,000 price range.

Oris Dunham, executive director of the airport, says that those neighborhoods that are closest to the runway will be bought out and the families moved through a federal relocation procedure. But Irving Mayor Bob Pierce says he is worried not just about the neighborhoods that will be bought out, but about the added noise over the rest of the city. And Pierce doesn’t think the expansion is necessary because, he says, its economic impact on Irving and the Metroplex will be small. Since airline deregulation in 1978, D/FW has become one of the major hubs of the airline industry, and now more than 50 percent of all passengers who pass through the airport simply change planes there and never leave its grounds. “These people add almost nothing to our local economy,” Pierce says.

Dunham vehemently disagrees. If the new runways aren’t built, he says, American Airlines won’t build its planned $1 billion super-terminal. “If the Metroplex wants its economic base to grow,” insists Dunham, “then this expansion is absolutely necessary.”

Airport planners want the runway far away from the core of the airport so that the instrument-landing radio guidance beams of the old runways and the new runway will not interfere with each other.

Pierce contends that the only time the airport would need such a capability is when three planes need to land at exactly the same time during bad weather. “Now, how often,” asks Pierce, “do you think that will be happening?”

While the city of Irving and the airport argue over exactly where to place the runway, Yong is left with worrying whether his neighborhood will be bought out or left to sit and decay beside a loud runway. But, he says, he’s afraid to say anything bad about the airport or its planners. “If they get mad at me,” he says, “then they won’t buy my land. Then I’m stuck with the noise.”