Meeting addresses plans on tours over Lake Mead

Monday, April 26, 2004 | 10:41 a.m.

The first step in the long journey to draft an air tour management plan for Lake Mead National Recreation Area begins Tuesday with a meeting to determine the scope of the plan.

The public session begins at 6 p.m. at the Henderson Convention Center.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Park Service on April 16 began developing a management plan for the Park Service-administered recreation area southeast of Las Vegas, a process that is expected to take 2 1/2 years to complete and could result in restrictions on where and how often air tours can fly.

At first glance, air tour industry leaders say, the Lake Mead plan would have minimal effect on local companies. The Lake Mead plan, after all, does not affect tour planes that are en route to the Grand Canyon. Commercial airliners approaching McCarran International Airport over Hoover Dam and the lake and military aircraft also are not affected.

Grand Canyon tour operators typically fly over the Lake Mead recreation area since it's between Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.

"The Lake Mead plan specifically exempts planes that are in transit to the Grand Canyon," said Jim Petty, president of Air Vegas, one of the city's oldest Grand Canyon tour operators. "But there is a technicality that if you give a tour of the lake (while en route to the Grand Canyon) you may be subject to it (the Lake Mead regulations). So what does that mean? Do we have our passengers take their headphones off when they fly over the lake?"

There are only two air tour operators that offer Lake Mead flights. In Southern Nevada, Lou Kaminsky, vice president of Dam Helicopter, said since Jan. 1, 2000, his company has flown 100,000 passengers on scenic helicopter tours that start and end at a helipad near the Hacienda hotel-casino, south of Boulder City and north of Hoover Dam.

The other operator that flies exclusively over the park also doesn't expect the new rules to be a problem. Herb Hess, general manager of Laughlin Aviation, said his company takes about 35 tourist flights a day Saturdays and Sundays from a helipad near the Riverside hotel-casino in Laughlin.

"We'll attend the meeting," Hess said. "But we're really down here out of the way, not really bothering anybody."

But environmentalists may dispute that.

Bart Patterson, overflights liaison for the Southern Nevada Group of the Sierra Club, said his organization plans to be a part of the debate. And he said he can't see how a Lake Mead air tour management plan can't include some of the air traffic that runs between Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.

Patterson said he hopes to bring the issue of aircraft noise to the debate -- a viewpoint that should strike fear in the hearts of Grand Canyon air tour operators.

Tour operators say some of the noise restrictions enacted at the Grand Canyon, which include caps on numbers of flights and the development of restricted airspace over most of the park, has hurt their business.

Patterson said areas of solitude around Las Vegas are disappearing and the Sierra Club plans to raise the issue of noise and how it would affect various wilderness areas and wildlife habitats around Lake Mead. He said he expects he would have a great deal of support after seeing the public protest a plan for a heliport in the Anthem area.