Luke Special Air Traffic Rules Area

[swatson999]

Flew to Phoenix (KDVT) last weekend, and I noticed that the Luke SATR area is being depicted as a *Restricted* area (IIRC). I think this might be a mapping error...it's not Restricted, but you do have to contact Luke RAPCON prior to entering it.

Can someone at Dynon or Seattle Avionics take a look and see if it's mapped incorrectly? It caused me a bit of momentary confusion and concern, until I realized that I was okay and it was just a mapping discrepancy

 

[dynonsupport]

Was this on a scanned chart or the vector map? Seattle Avionics only provides scanned data, so just checking why you might have asked them to look.

We'll look, but generally this is because special airspaces don't have ways to put them in the database so the FAA calls them something normal the best they can. Restricted sounds reasonable since contacting a controller before entering is one form of restriction. They mark the SFRA in DC as a "TFR"...

 

[swatson999]

This was on the map page w/ terrain...the scanned charts, obviously, showed it just as it was scanned (but, since there's no legend available, and it's a weird hybrid marking of the border which looks *kind* of like a Restricted area, but not exactly like it, it was a tad confusing).

Now, I knew ahead of time that it wasn't restricted (I did plan ahead ), but it was still disconcerting for a moment.

If you look at the legend on the Phoenix TAC, you can see the different airspace boundary marking.

Odd that they don't have a way to classify this sort of airspace (but not terribly surprising). I do remember when this was first being discussed, the local pilots were saying that it was essentially a "pseudo-Class-C airspace"...same requirements, but not *quite* the same as Class C, etc.

I don't know if there are other oddball airspaces like this around the country...might be a suggestion for the FAA to figure out how to properly designate this in ARINC data...