PilotEdge Forums

The recorded aircraft on the network generally operate from non-towered airports, by design. An exception to this is the military traffic, which operates from various towered facilities on the network.

After a few attempts to handle live traffic mixed in with high density drone operations at various bases, I've decided that it would be best for all involved to treat the military fields (and Palmdale) as non-towered airports.

If anyone has any issues with this, please let me know. If there is sufficient live military traffic on the network, I can potentially designate a couple of the facilities as being towered (Edwards & Yuma, for example, which currently have no drone traffic) if that would be useful, but for now, the starting position is that the military fields and PMD are now non-towered.

EDIT for clarification: All military airfields' towers, AND Palmdale's tower, are now closed. Once the system is updated to reflect this, pilots will be able to tune the CTAF for those fields (the tower freq) and announce their intentions, as they would any non-towered field. Yuma (NYL) is a joint-use public facility with no drone traffic. The tower will REMAIN OPEN there. I will make a post here when the frequency update is done.

Keith how do you want us to deal with frequency changes regarding live traffic going into those airports? Just 'frequency change approved' or 'contact tower', expecting the pilot to be aware of this exception?

Treat it as a non-towered field, "frequency change approved." I'll PM you regarding thoughts around the required freq DB updates.

Yuma is a joint-use facility, with air carrier traffic, so maybe it should be controlled?

Eric Stearns wrote:Yuma is a joint-use facility, with air carrier traffic, so maybe it should be controlled?

That's exactly why, it has military stuff to begin with.

Yuma was a bad example in my list above. I agree that a joint use public facility should be controlled. That is why there are no drones there.

Yuma will remain open. Palmdale and all other military fields' towers will close.

It is done. The server was restarted to allow the changes to kick in.

You can now dial a military tower and your transmission will NOT be heard by ATC. This allows you to make position announcements on the CTAF (just like a non-towered field) to coordinate your activity with any other pilot that is at the same field. This is very much like arriving at a Class D field after the tower is closed for the night.

Again, Yuma is an exception, as it is a public joint use civilian/military field. PMD (which is joint use, but effectively private), and all other military fields in norcal/socal now have closed towers on PilotEdge unless otherwise specified via NOTAM (we'll soon have a NOTAM section on the site).

March Air Reserve Base (KRIV) is currently uncontrolled, but we plan on making it controlled in the near future.

March Air Reserve base is now considered a towered airport again. It is the only towered airport on PE that has active drone traffic using a runway. If that becomes a problem, I'll relocate those drones as needed. They're relatively infrequent, though, and highly consistent in their behavior.