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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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They use the same ATC systems and protocols, so handoffs between airspace should be the same whether it's a military or FAA tower.
So there's a whole other ATC controlled by the military? I honestly have no knowledge of this and am surprised.
Kind of. It is more the same system, just some towers are operated by the military and some by the FAA. Each has their own airspace they are responsible for, but civilian aircraft can fly through airspace managed by military ATC and vice versa.
I'm not sure why it is like that nowadays. I guess in the beginning of ATC in the US it made sense for air bases to control the nearby airspace, and it probably just went from there, with maybe consolidation of towers as a cost-cutting measure along the way.
Caveat: it's been years since I've had to know any of this, so this might be outdated or misremembered.
So why didn't the military tower catch the helicopter in that DC crash? The FAA failed but the Army also failed? Two failures?
I've not read the report, but there'd only be one tower responsible for the airspace. Iirc, it was an FAA tower. What I heard happened was that the helicopter didn't follow the tower's instructions. But, again, I'm months out of date on that incident.
Imagine airspace like a tray of cookies baked too-close together. Some are bigger than others, some are weird shapes, some are sugar cookies, some are chocolate. But it's a tray full of cookie. There's only one cookie at each spot.
To stretch the metaphor further, imagine an ant walking across the tray. It's still only on one cookie at a time and it doesn't care if it's chocolate or sugar. At the edge of a cookie there's a handoff between cookies, where cookie A says "hey, cookie B, an Ant X is about to walk on you. Don't let them crash into any other ants, k? They're your responsibility now."
Anyways, I'm going to go let my caffeine kick in.
lolwut? Cookies with ants on them. I just don't understand how there's a military ATC and a civilian ATC and they aren't sitting in the same room. They should be sitting in the same room.
Why would they sit in the same room? They're managing different airspace. There's over 250 towers, they can't all sit in the same room.
OK, figuratively. From this it seems like there are two (more?) systems that are both sharing airspace that don't know what the other is doing. That's all I mean about "sitting in the same room". Mabye a zoom call?
You say "different airspace" but there's only one airspace. It's the one the planes are flying in.