There are air defense zones where, if you enter without notice, it's assumed you're a terrorist. There are military restricted areas where practicing dogfighters don't want to run into a Bonanza. There are also no-excuses, absolute-exclusion prohibited areas, the airspace above the White House perhaps the best known of them.
Today, everywhere you look there is airspace that is for one reason or another forbidden to pilots who fly by eye and choose not to have their routing defined by radio and air traffic controllers.
In 1927, there was no piece of sky that was off limits to aviators. And what the cartographers must constantly keep in mind is that all this information has to be made crystal clear to a pilot reading a chart with one hand and flying an airplane with the other. Read it and you'll understand why AC&C map-makers all have degrees in cartography: There are 147 symbols for topographical and cultural information alone, with nearly 100 more for purely aeronautical features, and each is specified right down to type face and size, color, and line thickness.
"The standards" have been collected in an inch-thick volume that spells out everything from how to depict a kanat (an underground aqueduct with surface air vents) to the symbols for "populated places in ruins," the difference between wadis and sebkhas in a desert, and when a rock that is "bare or awash" is big enough to be shown as a tiny island. Says Terry Laydon, director of the AC&C, "The FAA comes up with the concepts and features to be depicted on the charts, but we develop the standards and then work out the issues-what should be depicted and how it should be presented to the pilot." Today, raging civilization has built cell phone towers, drag strips, domed stadia, airports, dams, skyscrapers, race tracks, power lines, many-spired Mormon temples, parachuting sites, Disneylands, radio astronomy antennas, tank farms, ski lifts, power plants, and a hundred other "cultural features." Today, they're all included on sectionals. "People would fly and take notes for the pilots who'd be coming along behind them," says Christo Cambetes, a NOAA staff cartographer. In those days, landmarks were roads, rivers, railroads, towns, fairgrounds, and the occasional lighted beacon, and the pace was slow enough that the charts were accompanied by text descriptions of the route, sometimes on the other side of the chart. Sectionals began as strip maps showing the landmarks and terrain between basic destinations, the very first of them Moline, Illinois, and Kansas City, Missouri. skies by using paper charts produced by what is today called the Office of Aeronautical Charting and Cartography (AC&C), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and thus a ward of the Department of Commerce. They never flash a red light and announce "WARNING: SIGNAL LOST!" They can be consulted on the kitchen table or in the bathroom. It uses paper, ink, art, artisanship, and nearly a million tints to produce what pilots call sectional charts. See the little mock-Cessna chugging along over highways, rivers, and radio beacons? See the screen display zoom out to show it crossing all of North America at an imperceptible rate? And then zoom in to make it herky-jerk at 200 mph across my hometown streets? That's what aeronautical charts have come to: green and black pixels on a screen the size of a playing card, doing their best to approximate the basic outlines of the world below.įrankly, I prefer the old-fashioned way.