The Trump-Vance Plane Goes Into Prohibited Airspace.
Examining another entry in the annals of the weird.
Image via Google Earth; annotations by me. The distance from the departure end of Runway 1 at DC National Airport to the White House is less than two and a half miles, or less than a minute’s flying time. Much of official Washington is also visible in this shot—including the Pentagon, which is the five-sided (!) structure just above the word “Where” lower down in the image.
This post is a brief explainer on an odd incident last Wednesday. A Trump-Vance campaign plane, a Boeing 737-800 carrying JD Vance from DC to a campaign event in Phoenix, briefly violated the most tightly controlled airspace in the country. Which happens to be right over the White House. Let’s look at what, how, why, and whether it matters.
What is this about?
If you had been laying out airports with 9/11-style security concerns in mind, you would never have put DC National Airport right across the Potomac River from the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and most other elements of the US seat of government. And right next door to the Pentagon.
But National Airport is not going anywhere, precisely because it is so convenient for all those people in government—and the visitors, business people, residents, and others in the DC area who would rather not make the long slogs out to Dulles, in Virginia, or BWI, in Maryland.
How can a busy downtown airport coexist with all the other things going on in Washington, and all the people of various importance who live and work here?
One accommodation involves noise, and the steps through which aircraft makers (with quieter engines), airlines (with curfew hours), and the air-traffic system (through changed routings) have tried to lessen the impact. To be sure, life in DC is still plenty noisy, from aircraft. (But not leaf blowers!) Over the decades our family has gotten used to inbound planes coming over our house every minute or so, when the wind is from the south, or taking off above us every minute or so when wind is the other way. That’s life in the big city. This noise-consultants’ map of takeoff noise practically has a “you are here!” marker for us.
The other accommodation is for safety. Which brings us back to the Trump-Vance plane.
‘Immediate left turn. Stay over the river.’
If you look at the image at the top of this post, you’ll see that the White House is directly north of the departure end of Runway 1 at National Airport. It’s less than two-and-a-half miles straight-line distance away, or barely a minute’s flight time.
But if you look at noise chart just above, also showing hundreds of departures from Runway 1, you’ll see that not a single one of them keeps going north on takeoff. Every single one leaves the runway and within seconds makes a left turn to stay over the Potomac, away from houses and offices.
Here’s another flight-tracking image which conveys the same idea. (The red lines aggregate a huge number of northbound departure paths; the blue lines are arrivals.)
Data and image from National Airport authorities, via the How to DCA site.
This over-river routing is more than a courtesy or suggestion. One of the first things you learn about flying in the DC region is that in the post-9/11 era all the airspace is controlled. And you cannot ever fly over the governmental heart of the city, even if you’re an airliner taking off or landing at National. That’s the meaning of the famed zone “P-56,” which you see in the image above.
What the hell does ‘P-56’ mean?
This is a question the pilots of the Trump-Vance 737 might well have asked themselves before taking off.