Originally Posted by
Chronic Snoozer
Thanks for caps. Helpful. So your issue is that it isn’t moving quickly enough. Roger.
You may have sensed some frustration in the tone and format of the post to which you responded. But I am, frankly, sick and tired of the indolence and casual corruption of government bureaucracies. (Watching the Robodebt Royal Commission hearings for the last fortnight has probably made me just a little more nauseous than usual.) For some reason aviation cops more than its fair share (all dressed up in the rhetoric of ‘safety’ and – in the case of airspace locked up for the ADF – ‘security’ and ‘public interest’ of course).
It would probably surprise CASA OAR and the ADF to learn that the existence of aircraft with “weapons, l@sers, jamming, high energy emitters” in airspace does not, of itself, actually satisfy the criterion for declaring that airspace a Romeo. All you have to do is read the legislation conferring the power to declare Romeos to know that. But hey – who cares what the law says? And even if I’m wrong on that point, Romeos are supposed to be usable on the conditions which must accompany the declaration of the Romeo. Again, you just need to read the legislation to know that but, again, who cares what the law says?
When spoony says: “The bottom line is Restricted areas are essential, and for good reason are often out away from populated areas which don't permit uninvolved aircraft.”, s/he’s just expressing an opinion based on delusions of dangerous grandeur rather than by the objective evidence of risk. As Geoff has pointed out, our allies like the UK and the USA manage to train and sustain formidable airborne defence capabilities without the equivalent volumes of Restricted airspace.
In another thread I posted an ex-RAAF mate of mine’s answer to a question I asked him recently about the airspace arrangements around the pommie equivalent of a Willytown and Amberley. My mate’s been flying in pommieland for decades. This is part of his response:
In UK there’s a concept called MATZ (MIL Air Traffic Zone). Technically they’re optional for us to avoid, but we “should” seek permission to enter. They’re treated as class G otherwise. This is the main form of protection for fighter bases in our busy airspace like at Coningsby. Some RAF stations have Class D around them, notably Brize Norton. That you can’t ignore but I’ve never had a problem asking for a crossing.
Also in UK we have no designated Low Flying lanes for the fast jets: they can (and do) this any/everywhere. We all just have to see and avoid!
Think about that, spoony:
Even the airspace around the RAF bases themselves is not a Romeo or Class C, much less great swathes of airspace in which the aircraft based there train. How is it that the RAF isn’t "swapping paint" with civil “interlopers” and bringing down Jumbo jets with lasers and high energy emitters? Isn’t Restricted airspace “essential” to avoid that?
My mate also gave an example of the kinds of circumstances that would satisfy the criterion for the declaration of a Romeo in Australia:
Note the nearby red areas [in the chart my mate sent me]: that’s army space over Salisbury Plain and that’s more serious: we almost never cross there as they grunts are shooting at each other in there with tanks etc (currently a lot of Ukrainian units in there being trained on SL ordnance).
You see: the actual criterion for the declaration of a Romeo turns on risks created by what’s happening
under the airspace that creates risks in the airspace.
But what do we have in Australia? Delusions of dangerous grandeur resulting in the normalised deviation of locking up vast volumes of airspace so that aircraft whose numbers can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand – and sometimes on one finger of one finger – can operate without the prospect of being disturbed by and having to respond to irritating “interlopers”. (That word “interlopers” manifests an attitude that’s so typical in Australia. In the USA it’s actually the military aircraft that are interlopers in the citizens’ airspace.) If Romeos were declared in accordance with the law, the “interloper” would not be a surprise because their use of the airspace would be in accordance with the published conditions and the military operations would be adjusted accordingly. But we can’t have that. Romeos that are unusable on any conditions when active are “essential” from the perspective of folks like spoony whose opinions will no doubt weigh heavily in the solemn deliberations of CASA OAR in the consultation process, in which process the law is unlikely to intrude.