FAA proposes special Arctic Ocean airspace

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a notice saying that it is proposing to establish some special use airspace along a narrow corridor stretching north across the Beaufort Sea into the Arctic Ocean from the Alaska North Slope coast around Oliktok Point. The special airspace will consist of a warning area, to alert aircraft entering the airspace of potential hazards to flight.

Apparently the U.S. Department of Energy has requested the warning area, as a precaution associated with planned research into Arctic clouds and the influence of these clouds on the rate of sea-ice retreat. The idea is to investigate the character of clouds and their influence on sea ice, as a function of latitude, along a zone from near the coast to near the North Pole. This issue is of importance to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a multi-agency research effort coordinated with international climate-change research programs, the FAA notice says.

The research will involve the firing or dropping of ice-penetrating projectiles for measuring the thickness and mechanical properties of sea ice, and to make measurements in the water below the ice. The researchers will also fire sensor-equipped rockets upwards from the surface, with the sensor equipment returning to the surface by parachute, the FAA notice says.

And ships will deploy instrumented tethered balloons to obtain vertical profiles of the properties of the atmosphere and clouds, with the balloons being cycled vertically through the cloud layers. The cycling of the balloons up through clouds up to heights as great as 10,000 feet precludes the use of the use of lighting and marking on the balloons and tethers at 50-foot intervals, as is normally required. Besides, the operation of the balloons in clouds would render warning lights ineffective, the FAA notice says.

- Alan Bailey