Plans take flight for adding passengers and cargo at Ontario.

After years of rhetoric about the need to redirect growth in air travel from LAX, efforts are finally moving forward under Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to grow both passenger and cargo traffic at Ontario International Airport.

Los Angeles World Airports, the L.A. city-run body that oversees both airports, has expanded its broadcast media marketing campaign for Ontario, using ads on Internet booking sites to target business travelers looking to avoid the hassles of Los Angeles International Airport.

Meanwhile, airport officials are about to consider a plan, long in the works, to greatly expand cargo handling facilities at Ontario. A $125 million proposal put forward by airport property developer Aeroterm would add 1 million square feet of cargo handling space at the airport, enough to process loads from an additional 15 to 20 planes at one time.

"This is all about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan to regionalize air traffic," said Mark Thorpe, director of air service marketing for the airport agency. "For the last three years, we've been trying to spread out air passenger traffic through our media campaign. Now, we're looking to spread out air cargo traffic with this new facility."

Ontario Airport has long been the linchpin of efforts to regionalize air traffic as opposition to expanding LAX has intensified. Three of the four other local airports--Bob Hope in Burbank; Long Beach; and John Wayne in Orange County--are all hemmed in by development and have hard passenger and/or flight caps that make them virtually impossible to expand.

Los Angeles also owns Palmdale Airport but it's too far away to appeal to most L.A. County businesses and residents and has had a hard time getting off the ground. Late last year, one air carrier, Scenic Airlines, abandoned a short-lived effort to run passenger service from Palmdale to Las Vegas.

The only other regional possibility, converting the closed U.S. Marine base at El Toro in Orange County was taken off the table when voters there decided to turn it into a park.

Ontario Airport, on the other hand, is the only area facility with room to expand and with nearby residents that mostly favor airport growth. With little opposition, the airport agency built a new terminal in the late 1990s to accommodate more passengers.

But the growth has been slow thanks to a classic "chicken-and-egg" syndrome: Major domestic and international carriers have been slow to add flights out of Ontario because of a lack of passengers, but more passengers won't come until there's a much broader selection of flights.

Plans to market Ontario as a less-crowded alternative to LAX stalled for years, but restarted three years ago with $1.2 million in annual broadcast and print-media buys. Last month, airport officials kicked off the annual spring campaign, this time with an Internet component. The main target: business travelers, especially those at companies with employees living east of the San Gabriel River (605) Freeway in the San Gabriel Valley.

Rail link

The marketing campaign has paid off--to a point. Last year, Ontario Airport saw 7.1 million passengers, up 4 percent from 2004.

"That's a fairly average rate of growth for local airports, not the kind of growth we would like to see coming from Ontario," said Michael Armstrong, lead regional planner for aviation with the Southern California Association of Governments, who believes more needs to be done to get air travelers to use Ontario, especially on the ground side.

"It's still way too difficult for people in the core air travel market--the western part of Los Angeles and Orange counties--to get to Ontario," he said.

The planning agency views a high-speed rail link between L.A. and Ontario as the main long-term alternative. But in the short run, Armstrong said the agency is working with Los Angeles airport and local transit officials to explore the option using Metrolink and lots in central L.A. with buses running to and from Ontario.

While promoting passenger traffic at Ontario is proceeding incrementally, cargo traffic could leap if Aeroterm's proposal wins government approvals in the next few months.

Currently, United Parcel Service of America has a major cargo operation at Ontario and FedEx Corp. has a smaller facility. But there's no room for third-party carriers, including freight forwarders and charter cargo flights, to run flights out of Ontario.

"We've got specialty cargo carriers other than FedEx and UPS that are clamoring for more space at LAX and there just isn't any," Thorpe said. "While we're not at crunch time yet, we will be in a couple years. This facility would give them a relatively nearby place to expand."

While there are former military bases in the High Desert and Inland Empire that cater to cargo, including the Southern California Logistics Center at the former George Air Force Base near Victorville, those are too far away to provide immediate service for companies in the L.A. area.

But the massive proposed Aeroterm facility at Ontario has been a long time coming. The project site--an old Lockheed Martin facility on 100 acres at the northwest corner of the air field--was first put out to bid four years ago.

Controversial project

Aeroterm won the bid in mid-2003, but not without some controversy. The project got caught up briefly in the frenzy surrounding the "pay-to-play" scandal that enveloped the administration of former L.A. Mayor James Hahn.

Then-airport commission president Ted Stein sat in on at least one Aeroterm presentation, prompting opposing bidders to claim he interfered on Aeroterm's behalf. Aeroterm officials deny that Stein had any direct role in the selection process. Stein could not be reached for comment.

Then, once Aeroterm won the bid, the environmental process took longer than anticipated. The site had soil contamination from its days as a Lockheed facility. And there were concerns from the city of Ontario about the truck traffic the facility would generate.

"No question this is a massive project with environmental, noise and traffic impacts that had to be analyzed. We fully expected it to take at least 18 months," said Steve Forrer, a developer with Aeroterm.

A draft environmental impact report is now being circulated for comment and hearings in coming weeks, though the process won't be completed until the summer. After that, Forrer said, the project should take about 12 to 15 months to build out.

When completed, the project will contain a 1-million-square-foot sorting and cargo-handling facility, with more than 1 million square feet of adjacent airfield space to accommodate large jet aircraft, including the Airbus 380 super jumbo jet.

"The idea is to offload the cargo from the planes, sort the cargo on site and then get it out the other side on trucks," Forrer said.

He added that while there have been no formal talks, Aeroterm hopes that FedEx will become a major leasebolder, enabling the air cargo giant to expand its operations at Ontario.

Massive as this facility is, SCAG's Armstrong said it may take a while to realize its full potential, since most international cargo traffic is handled on international passenger flights, not dedicated cargo planes.

"If you really want to capture the international cargo traffic that's flooding LAX, you need more international passenger flights going out of Ontario. And that's going to take time," he said.