The Sky Is Zoned Too: What Special-Use Airspace Means for Base Master Planning

By Nathaniel Pyron

Every planner knows a parcel has a zoning district. Fewer civilians realize the sky above it has one too. I'm Nathaniel Pyron, a military urban planner specializing in military master planning with an airport and airfield focus, and the "Airspace" half of my job title gets questions at every conference I attend. So here's the plain-English version: the military doesn't just plan the ground inside the fence line. It has to plan the air above it — and the two plans are inseparable.

The Federal Aviation Administration calls it Special Use Airspace, or SUA: defined volumes of sky where military activities must be confined, and where nonparticipating aircraft face limitations. There are seven types: Prohibited Areas, Restricted Areas, Military Operations Areas (MOAs), Warning Areas, Alert Areas, Controlled Firing Areas, and National Security Areas. Two of them — Prohibited and Restricted — are regulatory airspace created through formal rulemaking; a Restricted Area is the one that says keep out while it's hot, because the activity inside is hazardous. The rest are nonregulatory: they identify where military activity happens so everyone else can work around it.

The one civilians hear about most is the MOA. A MOA is established below 18,000 feet to separate nonhazardous military training — air combat maneuvering, formation work, intercept practice — from instrument-flight traffic, and to warn visual-flight traffic where it's happening. The MOA system itself dates to the mid-1970s, created after a string of military-civilian midair collisions and near misses. Every one is charted on sectional maps with its altitudes, hours, controlling authority, and using agency, and flight service stations keep the daily schedules.

Why a land-use planner cares about airspace

Here's the connection that makes this a planning topic, not just an aviation one: the mission footprint of an airfield doesn't end at the fence. It ends where the airspace ends. A MOA or restricted area that covers thousands of square miles shapes what can happen on the ground beneath it — wind turbines that would punch into a training corridor, tall structures near low-level routes, even lighting that interferes with night operations. Military training routes, the low-level corridors fighters use to get to and from their training areas, cross entire states. Airspace is the invisible half of every installation's master plan.

That matters enormously in the Pacific. Training airspace over water becomes Warning Areas — huge volumes where the military warns, rather than excludes, other users. Long-range strikes, refueling tracks, and over-water ranges all depend on airspace that has to be coordinated with civil aviation, shipping lanes, and neighboring nations' air traffic authorities. When I think about airfield master planning out here in the Pacific region, the airspace footprint is often the largest line item in the whole plan — bigger than any single facility we would ever draw on a site plan.

The rules of the sky

Two principles govern how this all works, and both would sound familiar to any municipal planner. First: use only what you need, only when you need it. Federal law guarantees every citizen a public right of transit through navigable airspace. The military is legally obligated to take the minimum airspace necessary for the mission and release it back to other users when training isn't scheduled. Large areas get subdivided so controllers can activate only the slice that's in use. MOAs get split into sectors. Schedules get published daily. It's shared-use planning, enforced by regulation.

Second: the FAA has the final word. The Defense Department proposes, but FAA Headquarters is the final approval authority for permanent and temporary special-use airspace. Changes that could significantly affect the environment trigger environmental review, with the FAA as a cooperating agency — which means communities get a formal voice. Airspace proposals draw public comments from general-aviation pilots, environmental groups, tribes, and local governments, and I've watched serious proposals get reshaped by that process. The sky, like the ground, is planned in public.

Nathaniel Pyron's rule of thumb: if your base master plan doesn't show the airspace, it's only half a plan. The runway is where the aircraft lives. The MOA is where it works. Plan both or plan neither.

What this means on the ground

So what does the airspace-aware planner actually do differently? Three things.

First, we plan facilities for the airspace they serve. A base with an adjacent restricted area supporting live ordnance training needs explosive-safety quantity-distance arcs drawn on its master plan. A base under a low-level training route needs to check building heights and crane operations against flight profiles. The airspace decision becomes a land-use constraint, and land-use constraints are the planner's bread and butter.

Second, we keep the airspace defensible. Encroachment doesn't just threaten missions on the ground — wind farms, urban lighting, and radio-frequency emitters can erode the usability of training airspace from below. Programs like the Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration program, which buys buffer land around installations, are partly airspace protection by another name: keep the ground quiet and dark, and the sky above it stays usable.

Third, we talk to the neighbors. My three years as a community planner with the Marine Corps — at Camp Blaz and in Darwin, Australia — taught me that the most useful planning conversations happen across the fence line. The same is true above it. Airspace proposals live or die on whether the surrounding communities were brought in early, and the studies that coordinate base and community land use routinely carry airspace compatibility recommendations alongside noise contours and safety zones.

The principle

Zoning tells you what can happen on a parcel. Airspace tells you what can happen above it. The military planner's job is to hold both maps at once — and to remember that the people flying under visual flight rules through a MOA, the farmers under a low-level route, and the aircrews training in the restricted area are all using the same sky for different reasons. The system works when the boundaries are clear, the schedules are honest, and the airspace is no bigger than the mission requires. In my experience, that's the same formula that works on the ground.

About the author

Nathaniel Pyron is a military urban planner specializing in military master planning with an airport and airfield focus, based in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has served with the United States Marine Corps for the last 3 years as a community planner, based at Camp Blaz and Darwin, Australia, and studied urban planning at Arizona State University, School of Urban Planning. His LinkedIn title is "Urban Planner (Land Use & Airspace)".