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Yes, the normal stupidity of bureaucracy.
But Secretary Buttigieg reacted to Elon Musk!
https://x.com/SecretaryPete/status/1842271678274928964
Musk reacted first aggressively, but after the call conciliatory:
Maybe he overreacted? Let’s see what he posts tomorrow.
But I think “legitimate” could be a key word here. It is an emergency, business as usual shouldn’t apply, and they shouldn’t restrict the airspace in any way. It is not like aircraft/helicopters pilots are blind, they are not crashing into each other easily.
Edit:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1842352252922843403
I think we need subject-mater expertise here. How is airspace usually regulated? What would happen if all restrictions were lifted? How hard is it to operate in the mountains (especially takeoff and landing)?
I'm sure FEMA considers Starlink to be low-priority compared to food, water, gas, etc. It's plausible that SpaceX flying wildcat deliveries of Starlink is net-negative to the relief efforts, but I would like to know why specifically they think that.
EDIT: Per CNN's Pete Muntean, "an unprecedented number of airplanes, helicopters, and drones swooping in to help with Hurricane Helene recovery efforts are now posing a safety hazard. There were 30 near-mid-air collisions last Saturday, a federal source tells me." I guess that's the official line. No idea if it's accurate or not.
I am not a pilot, but a rough overview...
Normal operations fall under various types of airspace classifications: Class A (18000-60000 foot above sea level), Class B - D (funnels of airspace near various sizes of towered airports), Class E (between 1200 foot above ground level and 18000 foot above sea level, with some exceptions not relevant here, and above 60,000 foot above sea level), and Class G or unclassed airspace (generally under 1200 foot above ground level, with some exceptions).
Class A-D, you are under the direct control of a towered airport or other air traffic controller, rarely more than one. Class E means you can be under air traffic control for instrument flight rules, or you can operate in visual flight rules and you're allowed to fly whatever without radio traffic (though insurance companies will frown on this). Class E airspace over 10000 foot above sea level requires ADS-B out, and in practice it's pretty hard to operate without it, but people do still run below without ADS-B out.
Rules for drones are complicated, and a lot of the whole mess about Class G is the FAA trying to control where they can go and when.
Then you have various special airspaces, geographically (and sometimes temporally) specific stuff, with various constraints on entry. Restricted areas (and warning areas) have dangerous exercises going on at some times: you're pretty much never allowed in them when active unless you're working with the US military, and going in can get you in trouble with the feds in a way that results in pulling your pilot's license. Prohibited areas are like that, but they're always active, and you'll probably go to jail if you break one. MOAs are in the same realm, but it's not technically illegal to enter while flying visual flight rules, just a really bad idea.
Then you have Special Air Traffic Rules and Special Flight Rules Areas. These are all unique one-offs with their own special constraints, which can be as minor as having to call someone ahead of time before flying certain altitudes or locations, or as serious as needing a police officer with a loaded gun pointed at your pilot while you fly (the DC SFRA is a mess). Busting these can and does result in a military response: I know a pilot who's gotten the nickname 'takedown' because the SATR contact actually lost his tail number, and he ended up pulled over by a Blackhack and sprawled onto the tarmac.
Lastly, you have Temporary Flight Restrictions. These are issued rules for temporary limits in an area. They're fairly common and can happen for ground events (every Presidential visit, and even major sports games will have its own NOTAM), or they can happen because of high disaster response. Some TFRs are blanket prohibitions (you are not flying at low altitude near the President), but others will simply require calling ahead, and others still will restrict flights to certain groups.
In this case, there are very clearly TFRs specific to several disaster areas,
All restrictions being lifted wouldn't happen. The FAA would spontaneously explode if you even considered touching most MOAs, Class A-C airspace is genuinely like that for a reason, and the SATRs are statutory. But most air space in the mountains are Class E and Class G. They're not outside of FAA control, but you can normally wildcat all you want in them.
There might be a slightly increased risk of midair collision, and those do happen, both drone-aircraft and aircraft-aircraft. Crowded areas with unprofessional pilots are especially dangerous, and there was a recent Oshkosh incident that's made it more prevalent in a lot of minds. On the gripping hand, a lot of the FAA's concern on drones, the FAA vastly overstates a lot of the risk for unintentional incidents. You just shouldn't be that low in a fixed-wing aircraft unless you're about to land, and helicopters aren't doing the sort of movement that makes a drone-on-fixed-wing aircraft collision so dangerous.
((And also shouldn't be flying that low, although many helicopter pilots are daredevils.))
Fixed-wing on fixed-wing, near misses are more common than I'd like. ADS-B gives more warning if it's equipped, but especially near busy airports you also get a ton of false positives (from aircraft on ground), and outside of ADS-B you're dependent on the human eyeball to spot a thirty-foot object that might be closing distance at >200 knots combined speed, while you're in a vehicle with giant blind spots (like 'everything above you' or 'everything below you', cfe Aeromexico 498). The claimed thirty near misses isn't as serious as it sounds -- Oshkosh doesn't even count them at this point -- but a mid-sized flight school would be very upset to see that many in a month and not happy to see that many in six months, and not ever near-miss is gonna be reported.
Fixed wing, pretty rough. The Appalachias aren't that high, so you don't have the oxygen problems that the west coast mountains do, but they're messy areas to fly in from an updraft and thermal perspective, and there's a lot of space where you don't really have any way to handle an in-flight emergency. That's not helped by the lack of serious airports around and the roughness of terrain -- if you're not at 10k ASL, for a lot of western North Carolina your emergency response is gonna be to kiss your ass goodbye.
Helicopters have it a little better, but they tradeoff easier landing against much lower sustain.
Quick follow up to this (I'm a licensed pilot though I don't fly that frequently).
Class B is the really important one in the usual course of business (but all bets are off when TFRs come into play). Class C and D are pretty small and used for regional airports. If you accidentally fly through one, tower won't be happy but you won't get in serious trouble for it. And they're so small that accidentally flying through them is pretty hard anyway (the only real reason to enter them is to land at the airport in the center). And if you do want to fly through them, you just need tower to acknowledge your presence somehow. Easy.
Class B is special. It's used for the major international airports. The upper section measures sixty miles across (i.e. typically the entire city the airport is a part of). It has huge amounts of jumbo jets with hundreds of passengers each. And the government has absolutely no tolerance at all for any shenanigans in there. Students are mostly not allowed in without explicit permission from their instructor. Any plane entering needs explicit permission from ATC before entering and always has an assigned altitude and vector while there that they are not allowed to deviate from (barring genuine emergencies). And violating any of these rules has severe penalties.
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Thank you for taking the time to describe all that!
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There was probably some thing that happened that one time and there was an accident and then a rule for made.
Mid-air collisions happen more often than you might expect given the size of, well, the atmosphere even in spots that aren't busy disaster zones. There was one just a few weeks ago in Nevada in clear weather, and there have been several over the years in tourist flight hotspots like Alaska. The automated systems (TCAS) are getting better, but still aren't going to prevent everything.
Although in this case, I think we should, as a society, consider that reducing safety standards (in a limited capacity) is an acceptable risk in response to the much more imminent risk to life and limb. I'm not sure exactly what my judgement would be in this case.
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