Scared of mid-airs

Ed Rasimus wrote:

[stuff snipped]

Schedule published twelve hours before operations commence. Airspace
activated as scheduled, but morning fog precludes launches. Delays of
thirty minutes--should airspace be turned back? Launch when weather
allows and airspace is hot. Schedule is both slipped and compressed to
keep training flow and meet required completions dates.

Flight aborts because of maintenance problems. Beak B is now empty but
A and C remain "hot". Should GA aircraft be cleared through B or
should airspace remain blocked for fifteen minute late launch of
flight? Scheduled A/G mission cancelled because of unavailability of
properly configured aircraft. Add-on to schedule with available
aircraft to fly A/A sortie. Schedule flexes again.


In your experience in the USAF who did the actual coordination with the
FAA? In my experience it was a group at a numbered AF HQ, and the time
it took for unit-level schedule changes to make it up to the HQ and hit
the FAA caused a long delay,
with the flying unit assuming that the airspace coordination had been
done when it may or may not have actually occurred, which resulted in
aircraft on MTRs that supposedly were cold, unanticipated arrivals on
ranges, multiple units using the same MTR, etc.
We kept track of specific flight schedules via the frag orders, which
sometimes matched reality and sometimes not. We had a continual
problem with weekend use of MTRs when schedules changed but the USAF
had nobody on duty on Saturday/Sunday coordinating with the FAA in the
region where I worked.


John Hairell )