Hey pilots: Flying through MOAs (Military Operational Areas)?

Factual Questions
1

I have some open land down in Southern New Mexico, underneath CATO MOA & SMITTY MOA, which IIRC starts at 500’ AGL and extends past 50k feet. This particular MOA is used by the NM ANG.

A couple of nights ago (Thursday night), I was down, checking on the property and had myself the camp chair laid out, feet propped up on an old stump, when I was surprised to see a Cessna slowly buzzing along in the sky a handful of thousand feet above me! It’s been twenty years since I was up aloft as an observer (I never did get my Private License, and my knowledge is pretty rusty).

I thought MOAs were closed to general aviation. Or are VFR/IFR flights okay so long as you get clearance from the appropriate Regional Center (in this case, Albuquerque)?

Tripler
My HOA says “no drones” because of the MOA.

2

From a quick google, MOAs are not restricted at all, the designation is basically 'the military might be operating in this area so be careful. According to what I found, you don’t even need clearance, but it’s good to coordinate with whoever is doing military flights (if they’re active). Everything You Need to Know About Military Operations Areas

3

Yeah, back when I was actively flying traversing MOA’s was pretty routine.

IFR traffic will be routed by the appropriate ATC facility to avoid problems

VFR is a bit more on their own, but like I said ATC will let you know when and roughly where military hardware is frolicking. Most of them I’m familiar with also have schedules so you can look them up in advance. Highly advisable - a small Cessna vs. something like an F-16 is a bit like a bicycle vs. a fully loaded semi-truck. The Cessna won’t win that argument and the fighter pilot might not even be aware he ran you over.

Which is not to say they can’t share the same airspace - I once landed a two-seat Cessna at Fort Wayne Airport behind an F-16 and in front of a B737 with no problem, but that’s because ATC is good at traffic flow and separation (they did suggest that I not delay in leaving the runway. Which I did, because being chased by a B737 is… motivating).

4
  1. Technically, you don’t need to talk to or receive a clearance from anyone to enter a MOA. Both the civilian pilots and military pilots are responsible for collision avoidance. If you are in a civilian plane with a transponder, this helps, although radar coverage at low altitudes is poor in the Western US. In any case, your plane could have just been totally “winging it”, and no one is going to come after him.
  2. Many MOAs are not active 24/7 and will have published hours of operation, or are only activated intermittently by advance notice (a so-called Notice to Airmen or NOTAM). The SMITTY MOA is listed as active 0800-2200 (this is on the Albuquerque sectional chart).
  3. Even if a MOA is currently active according to its published hours, civilian air traffic control can generally find out whether any military equipment is using it, and will let you know if not. This isn’t a clearance since no clearance is required.
  4. While conducting VFR flights across the Western US under ATC monitoring (“VFR flight following”), I’ve often been handed off to military ATC facilities who will just give me altitudes and/or headings to fly through MOAs to keep clear of the military users.

For anyone interested, here is a link to the table in the sectional.

5

Nothing to add to the excellent regulatory explanations above. Any Cessna can dribble through any time it wants to. And (if under VFR) is free to contact ATC or not, and if so, to follow ATC’s advice or not.

As a practical matter, the majority of MOA airspace is lightly used by the military. The main exceptions are those surrounding the active duty pilot training bases.

Someplace like CATO or SMITTY used by the ANG probably gets very little use M-F and may only have a handful of jets in it all day during the weekends. In some ways the Cessna is safer in there than he would be outside the MOA just because so many other VFR slow-movers will choose to avoid MOAs on principle. Most times he’ll have the sky to himself. But if he doesn’t …

Despite Broomsticks’ contention above, IMO both airplanes are probably junk if they collide. At least the fighter pilot has a decent chance to jump out if he/she wasn’t killed in the immediate collision. The Cessna driver is almost certainly doomed regardless of the details. Absolutely aircraft do occasionally survive mid-airs and land safely. But it’s sure not the way to bet. Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 - Wikipedia

A practical problem with mixing slow-movers with maneuvering jets is the speed difference means a jet can run down a slow mover from any direction in the sphere: from straight down, straight up, above, below, behind, head-on, you name it. Even the most diligent slow-mover pilot with even the best of bubble-canopy outwards visibility simply can’t see and avoid all the potential threats from all the potential directions. Joe/Jane Sleepy Private Pilot in their Cessna doesn’t stand a chance of spotting the light gray dot that kills them.

Conversely from the fighter’s POV if you’re at speed and about to hit a slow-mover it’ll have been within ~10 degrees of your nose the whole time (net of your manuevering). Radar is helpful for spotting targets there, but depending on what else the fighter is doing the pilot may not be looking at it or be in the right mode at the critical time.


In the course of looking up the details on these particular MOAs I see the ones dedicated to Williams AFB, the pilot training base on the east side of Phoenix, are still in existence.

Willy closed as a USAF facility in 1993. 27 years later USAF hasn’t given back the airspace. And probably never will; there’s simply no way to ever regain it.

As to drones and the OP’s HOA, that seems like a convenient excuse rather than a reason. By FAR drones are restricted to at/below 400’ AGL. The SMITTY MOA extends from 500’ AGL upwards, with CATO piled on top of SMITTY at even higher altitude… So all (legal) drone ops would be outside the MOA anyhow.

6

Thanks guys! I thought it would be a pretty straightforward answer. I might have been confusing Restricted airspace activity with MOAs. I recall that while working up in Utah, under R-6404 A’s airspace, I had to get in contact with Range Controllers before a shot, to let them coordinate potential air traffic (vertical fragmentation radius). I had assumed it was the same thing for MOAs, but apparently not!

Yes, even I rolled my eyes when the HOA mentioned this at the annual meeting a couple of years back. Granted, I’m in favor of the rule, because I don’t want random drones buzzing around my soon-to-be cabin site; on the other hand though, they need to iron out their faulty logic.

Tripler
Thanks guys!

7

Restricted areas are as you say: the owning military unit 100% controls access and has deconfliction responsibility for anything / everything that goes on inside. Be that mock air combat, live missile firings, artillery practice, or EOD.

MOAs are the Lite less filling version of the same general desire for deconfliction. But with a big dollop of caveat emptor = don’t say we didn’t warn you if you get whacked.

When I was flying light airplanes I’d generally try to avoid MOAs and would ask ATC about other users in them if it was impractical to avoid transiting one. Seemed the cautious way to proceed. In some parts of the country though avoiding MOAs completely can lead to hours-long detours that may be very expensive for very little real safety benefit.

8

Ah, but they don’t have to collide to kill the Cessna. The wake turbulence of larger, faster airplanes can really cause problems for small plane pilots, and in some instances have even caused smaller airplanes to spontaneously disassemble. (Remember, I used to also fly ultralights. Through MOA’s on occasion.)

You’re assuming the HOA is using anything like “logic” or if they are that they might know said logic is faulty. It could be the HOA just doesn’t want drones and is blaming the FAA for what is really their own rule.

9

Good point. I hadn’t considered that.

Good to see you’re still here. I missed a lot of the folks while I was gone and you’re one of the especially missed ones.

10

This is exactly what’s going on. They’re manufacturing a situation that does not exist.

As a hijack to my own OP, and using Absolute's link, Skyvector.com which I do use often, I have two questions:

  1. Now that MOAs and Restricted areas are cleared up, can you refresh my memory on the differences in Classes of Airspace? IIRC Class “E” is ‘general unrestricted and uncontrolled’ airspace, and working up the Classes (to “D,” “C,” “B,” and “A”) all depends on the volume of air traffic and transponder necessity, right?
  2. Are pilots now ‘paperless’? As in, can you download your maps and flight plans to a tablet and fly electronically?

Tripler
Ground pounder.

11

Class G is “unrestricted and uncontrolled” but otherwise a progression of more control, rules, and traffic is pretty accurate. Don’t have time this morning to get into detail, and I’m sure someone else will be along shortly to fill that in.

Don’t know about the “paperless” thing - I haven’t flown in over a decade now and even when I was active I was on the low tech end of things.

12

As to airspace classes Airspace class (United States) - Wikipedia is pretty good and about as approachable as the topic gets. Looked at with a magnifying glass it starts to resemble the tax code. But the big picture isn’t too hard. Class A is most controlled / restricted and as we go farther along the alphabet the restrictions reduce.

Crudely:
A = High altitude enroute everywhere: 100% IFR. 100% radar. 100% ATC access controlled.
B = Major airline airports and ~30 mile vicinity: 100% ATC access controlled. 100% radar. VFR permitted only w ATC concurrence and control.
C = Lesser airports with radar-equipped local ATC & ~10 mile vicinity: 100% ATC communication required, but VFR access not controlled.
D = Airport with a control tower & ~5 mile vicinity: Tower visually manages aircraft arriving & departing, tower notification required for aircraft transiting.
E = Low-mid altitude enroute everywhere: IFR operations under ATC control, VFR operations permitted w/o ATC contact or knowledge. Most, not all, areas have radar coverage depending on altitude.
F = US doesn’t have.
G = Near-ground airspace everywhere including uncontrolled airports: ATC completely hands-off; pilots (including IFR) are 100% responsible for safe nav, collision avoidance, etc.

As to paperless …

My carrier has been 100% paperless for about 3 years now. It’s all in our issue iPad. Arrival / departure charts, enroute maps, procedure & aircraft manuals, today’s weather & flight plans, performance computations, the whole shebang. It’s all delivered through 5 primary apps and a handful of rarely used auxiliary apps.

The current effort is essentially v2.0 where we’re duplicating all the old paper ways but with a few tweaks and integrations empowered by tech in general and more and more by having live wifi nearly everywhere all the time.

The v3 in the works involves a massive overhaul of the legacy ground systems to integrate everything down there so it can be delivered up to us via a single do-all
app with a single do-all interface.

As well eventually the tablets will interface directly with the aircraft avionics; right now they are heavily firewalled off from each other.

Most major US airlines are in about the same place now.

Conversely, private pilots in lightplanes through bizjets have been able to do most of these same things since the early 2000s. They were definitely the leading force here and the big guys have been taking up the rear. In fairness, FAA took their sweet time getting on board with the idea.

13

Or, from another viewpoint, they let general aviation to a large extent work out the bugs and problems before letting the airlines get in on the tech.

14

Heh, this makes sense. Let the grunts figure out best practices before adopting them at higher headquarters.

Tripler
Thanks guys!

15

there’s definitely an advantage to calling a center to see if an MOA is active before entering it. I was scud running once because of the cloud deck and had a pair of A-10’s fly underneath me. they mus have been seriously low to the ground to do it. Actually I think it was F-16’s. I was learning to fly when it happened. Probably guard units. The A-10’s were at Oshkosh. different story.

ADS-B will be mandatory by 2025 and that will give everybody the ability to track the aircraft around them on their GPS.

16

Only if they bother to have ADSB in. ADSB has been mandatory in Australia for years now but most only have ADSB out and so they miss out on the pretty radar picture.

17

Admittedly, I had to look up ADSB: Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcasts.. I thought TCAS was the end-all, be-all of 21st Century aviation.

Tripler
Learnin by leaps and bounds here. …

18

TCAS and ADSB have different roles. TCAS is a dedicated collision avoidance system and, while it does display other aircraft on a cockpit screen, the relative position is not accurate and can’t be relied upon to identify where other aircraft are. ADSB is for position reporting and if you have ADSB IN capability you can have a cockpit screen that shows you exactly where the other aircraft are. It is not designed to give collision avoidance commands though.

19

Does ADSB inform you when you’re entering certain classes of airspace, or MOAs/Restricted airspace? In other words, does it track your position against blocks of air? Also, if you plug in your waypoints, will it tell you that, you’re at GPS waypoint TACOH or PILLA, or even others like BEANN (all near-Albuquerque locations, just for an example)?

Tripler
“Woop woop! Woop woop! You are now entering the Klingon Neutral Zone . . . Woop woop!”

20

ADSB itself doesn’t do that but there are GPS units that do. Some iPad apps are pretty good for that sort of thing. As noted above, general aviation is where the cutting edge of electronic device integration is at.