Originally Posted by
Geoff Fairless
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This led them to continue to turn a blind eye to airspace designations that they had no power to authorise. One of those was the declaration of Restricted Airspace outside of Australian 12 NM territorial waters, another is the Oakey so-called "Military Control Zone".
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With reference to DAH and I assume the relevant determination instrument the Oakey, Williamtown etc.CTRs are legally declared as Control Zones, no reference to Military CTR.
The references and symbology for the latter are on charts, I assume to indicate to pilots that they are different to civil CTRs with respect to the type of traffic therein and the fact that they are managed by military (RAAF) ATCs. I don't see a problem with that.
some expenditure on ATC equipment to keep the airspace acceptably safe. You only have to look to the US and Europe to see how it could be done.
In the early days of the "NAS" I recall Defence looked at changing many "R" areas to MOA, which in the U.S. I believe require the user to have radar surveillance of such areas. The cost to Defence to do so with the installation of new surveillance equipment and ATC or other personnel was high. As part of the exercise they looked at obtaining surveillance feeds from Airservices, but in many cases there was not the required low level coverage of the airspace.