Fun with TFRs
You're paying for this stuff...might as well play with it.
So much speculation about Joe Biden…where is he really? Where is he going? Is he already taking a dirt nap?
Let me to share one of the tools pilots use in everyday flight planning that can also scratch your itch to know what the corpse-minders are up to for the next few days and weeks. You could use this to keep tabs on where the candidates will be travelling, in case you want to attend a rally, or maybe, I don’t know, be on the scene of the next USSS security failure so you can photo-document it and drive paid subscriber traffic to your Substack. Whatever lifts your Stinson.
The air traffic security bubbles that exclude most traffic in the area surrounding certain Very Important Peeps are called Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs).1 There are several other kinds of TFRs that are used in situations where allowing flights to follow the ordinary airspace rules might either pose a security hazard or impede activities. There was, for instance, a TFR established at the site where the Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore Harbor until the wreckage was cleared and the ship towed away — it’s gone now and it’s legal to fly right over the site gawking all you like. Major league sporting events get stadium TFRs,2 as do wildfires, airshows, and Elon Musk yeeting another 50 StarLink satellites out of Wallops Island.
The central collection point for all filed TFRs is on the FAA website. By default you see everything; to see just VIPs, make that choice in the “Type” box and click “GO.”
And already there’s something interesting to notice here. Earlier today, there was a Wilmington DE TFR announced for July 26-29, but now it’s apparently been cancelled or is in the limbo of being reissued. Hmm. Interesting.
The date is the date the TFR was issued, not the date it becomes active. You have to click on the individual links to find out those details, and the FAA’s graphical TFRs are 8-bit sad. This is public data and there are websites and mobile apps that provide APIs that will display both the text and graphically overlay the TFRs on a variety of backgrounds including regular street maps and FAA sectional charts. One of the nicer free ones is SkyVector. This is what the Indianapolis TFRs listed above look like displayed over a VFR sectional chart.
Neither the text nor the graphical display will tell you who is being protected with a TFR, but you can deduce everything by cross-referencing the size of the exclusion with a desultory Internet search. These, for instance, are 5nm radius so they are for a lesser luminary than POTUS, who gets a whopping 30nm. These are in fact Kamala, who is making at appearance at some sorority do at the Indy Convention Center tomorrow. The overlapping or close proximity circles are quite typical, and tell you that she is flying into Indy Int’l (it broke my heart when they took Weir Cook’s name off the airport) and then being driven to the venue.
Former POTUS and current and past FLOTUS typically get 3nm. Donald Trump now also gets 5 as the official nominee for a presidential election. (The West Palm Beach TFR is his, as is the one in Charlotte tomorrow.)
So now you too, thanks to the taxpayer dollars flowing to the FAA, can spy a little bit on the people that spy on us. If you use this information for good and never for evil, I might write about the possibilities for surveillance using FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange.
And a TFR is one of a number of data packets distributed by the FAA called NOTAMs. Up until Petey B. the Boy Mayor of South Bend was put in a position where he could meddle with 10% of the US economy, NOTAM stood for Notice to Airmen. You can all see the problem here. It’s now Notice to Air Missions. Which obviously makes no fucking sense. Missions don’t read notices. Mercifully that’s the only place this daft nomenclature took hold and I’m still the proud holder of four separate FAA certifications declaring my status as an airman.
The worst nightmares of DHS/FAA security analysts are a mish-mash of The Sum of All Fears and that 24 episode where Jack Bauer has to transport a nuclear bomb out of Los Angeles in the back of a magical Cessna Caravan.