With the personal and professional implosion of former Rep. Randy Cunningham, the leading federal voice on the issue of San Diego's future airport belongs to Rep. Bob Filner, D-San Diego.

Filner arguably knows more about air transportation planning issues than even the now-disgraced Cunningham, who was a retired Navy fighter jock and one of only two American aces in Vietnam. While Cunningham was still strutting about the Top Gun school in the late 1980s, Filner was already wrestling with planning for this region's future air transportation needs.

As a member of the San Diego City Council, Filner led a successful effort in the early 1990s to block the relocation of Lindbergh Field to Brown Field in his South Bay district. Brown is a former Army Air Corps bomber training facility from World War II now used mostly for air cargo and small private craft. Sixteen or so years ago, Brown's commercial-grade runway (made to WWII bomb-resistant standards) was proposed as half of a binational airport spanning the international border and including Tijuana's Rodriguez Airport.

But residents living near Brown wanted no part of the greater noise and traffic a major airport brings, and as their representative, Filner was able to block that proposal.

So when Filner, whose 51st Congressional District takes in much of his old City Council district and is miles removed from Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, says that he can't foresee any likely political scenario in which Congress would agree to give up Miramar to San Diego County for civilian use, I tend to defer to his judgment.

More important, given Filner's history and expertise on this issue, I'm a bit puzzled as to why the local media are pretty much ignoring his proposal to build a state-of-the-art international airport in Imperial Valley and connect it to San Diego by high-speed maglev rail.

I'll grant you that Filner's plan contains far more vision and can-do spirit than we're presently accustomed to in our elected leaders. But Filner serves in Congress, and if he says the money is there for this project —— and that Miramar isn't happening —— you'd think that might carry some weight.

By high-speed rail, an Imperial Valley airport would be only 20 minutes removed from San Diego. Filner also points out that extending the maglev rail line to the Arizona border could make the rail line a viable freight and tourist conveyance. How many more Arizonans would vacation in San Diego if they could get here by train in under an hour instead of a drive of 5-8 hours or more? How much more freight would come to the Port of San Diego instead of Los Angeles or Long Beach if a maglev train could move it to inland markets in half an hour?

What it comes down to is what Filner distilled quite succinctly in a recent telephone conversation: "Nobody in San Diego wants an airport." Not next to them, anyway.

Voters in Imperial County recently approved by 80 percent a referendum on building the airport near El Centro, Filner said. Eighty percent.

And yet, the local airport authority and the local media —— including this newspaper's editorial page —— are basically ignoring Filner's entire proposal, fixated on a military base they have almost no chance of getting.

This is planning?

Contact staff writer Jim Trageser at (760) 740-5424 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.