The military will fight any enchroachment on their land or airspace.
With Miramar, people see all of that land and say, “Look, plenty of space for an airport.” However, those same people have no idea what the air traffic patterns are like and what adding heavy civilian traffic will do to operations. Further, the military will not be adding any more space or bases in SoCal and it is not possible to predict how much space we are going to need in the future for effective defense and training.
The word at Miramar is that there will be no civilian airport there. I don’t know what they are saying up at Pendleton but it is probably the same thing.
My personal OPINION is that an airport should be built in Ramona and either the 67 should be expanded or a new road/freeway should be built through Poway. Or we could be like the Japanese and build a sinking island (just kidding).
Ramona is a good place for a lot of reasons, but it won’t work due to terrain issues. There’s not enough room between Ramona and the mountains for an approach.
There’s a lot of places that are good for a lot of reasons but most of them have one or more insurmountable obstacles. The military sites (Miramar and Pendelton and, to a lesser extent, North Island) are the only places where an airport would actually fit and not have some huge obstacle or another. Except, of course, the fact that the military won’t give them up. Which is why the airport commission is in such a tough position.
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