Here’s why military flyovers keep taking you by surprise

The DC area got a sharper reminder than usual Sunday of its military neighbors: sonic booms left by F-16 fighter jets scrambled out of Joint Base Andrews to intercept a wayward private jet that later crashed near central Virginia, its pilot and passengers apparently victims of a loss of pressurization.

There was no way that was not going to send alarmed people scurrying to windows to see what made the racket. But another common and loud military contribution to our aviation soundtrack—scheduled ceremonial flyovers of Arlington National Cemetery, Nationals Park and other venues–don’t have to be a surprise.

People in the region have all kinds of reasons for wanting to know ahead of time when a loud flyover’s about to happen, from calming infants and pets, to transparency about military activity, to pure appreciation.

Sometimes the system works: people could know to look up May 24 for an Arlington flyover by four T-38 trainer jets in a missing-man formation because the District’s AlertDC service sent out a notice days before, which local news outlets could then share hours before. And anybody on the ground that Wednesday morning could also open a flight-tracking app like Flightradar 24 and see the path of those aircraft alongside the usual National Airport traffic.

Many other times, however, the heads-up people get of a flyover is briefer and louder: a crescendo of jet noise that swiftly blasts past the volume of a departure from National until it sounds like an airstrike in progress, leaving little to no time to mute a call or run outside, ideally with a camera or binoculars handy, and try to identify the aircraft.

A patchy system

That surprise factor—along with the ensuing “what was that?!” posts on Twitter and in Reddit’s r/washingtondc and r/nova forums—seems to be the result of an opaque notification process with a history of missed notices.

Even Arlington National Cemetery admits it can struggle to give its neighbors a heads-up of a funeral flyover via its @ArlingtonNatl Twitter account.

“At Arlington National Cemetery we recognize flyover information is important to our neighborhood/community partners and always strive to keep them informed,” public affairs chief Kerry Meeker wrote in an email. “As such, we do our best to post flyover information to our social media accounts (specifically Twitter) when we have all of the pertinent information and receive it in a timely manner.”

Many of these flights as well as everyday government helicopter operations further obscure themselves by operating without a standard identification system active, leaving people in the Washington area further confused about which agency just sent a few tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded hardware several hundred feet above their heads.

Meeker’s message specified AlertDC as the go-to source for Federal Aviation Administration updates about upcoming military air operations over DC

But that service of the District’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA) leaves residents guessing about which broad category of DC notifications—“Breaking News and Information,” “Community Outreach for DC Events,” or “General Alerts”—will yield a flyover heads-up.

And sometimes that heads-up never makes it out of the system. In April of 2022, an FAA-approved flight of the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team that ended with members jumping and landing at Nationals Park took even the U.S. Capitol Police by surprise and led to an evacuation of the Capitol.

The local-news site PoPville regularly publicizes flyovers announced via AlertDC, but editor and publisher Dan Silverman offered this thumbs-down assessment of the service in an email: “Not reliable or consistent at all.”

A search of AlertDC’s automated Twitter feed shows no tweets with the word “flyover” between Sept. 25, 2022 and March 25, 2023.

HSEMA’s public-affairs office responded to a query by saying the correct category of alerts for flyovers is “General Alerts,” under the “District of Columbia Alerts” category. But after I set my own account to subscribe to that category, two notices sent Thursday about flyovers Friday did not reach my inbox or phone.

“HSEMA receives military flyover information from FAA, military partners, and FEMA Watch Desk notifications,” the reply read. “Once our team receives notification of an upcoming military flyover, those details are distributed via AlertDC and posted on social media to the AlertDC account: @AlertDC.”

The reply did not address missed notifications, and HSEMA did not answer a query sent Friday about Thursday’s apparently misdirected notices.

When the feds don’t broadcast their flights

The last missing piece of the overflight puzzle is how often government missions operate without a normally-mandatory identification system called “Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast” (ADS-B) active, making them invisible on flight-tracking apps and sites.

Andrew Logan, who runs the Helicopters of DC aircraft-spotting project, frequently makes this point, noting that FAA regulations require government flights to keep ADS-B on unless “the aircraft is performing a sensitive government mission for national defense, homeland security, intelligence or law enforcement purposes and transmitting would compromise the operations security of the mission or pose a safety risk to the aircraft, crew, or people and property in the air or on the ground.”

As in, while Sunday’s scramble clearly meets those criteria, it’s hard to make the same case for ceremonial flights.

The FAA’s public-affairs office responded that the administration “engages with state and federal authorities as necessary to ensure the safety of the National Airspace System. We don’t discuss security measures for specific flight operations.”

Logan’s advocacy got a boost May 17 when Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.-DC) sent a letter to the heads of the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Park Service and the FAA calling helicopter flights without ADS-B active “a safety risk” that “makes it more difficult to reduce helicopter noise in DC”

Norton’s letter asked those agencies to specify how many of their helicopter flights in the DC took place with ADS-B inactive and how they determined whether those operations rated as “a sensitive government mission.”

Norton’s office and that of Rep. Don Beyer (D.-Va.) both noted that helicopter traffic rates as the chief source of aviation-noise complaints; in 2019, the Washington Post quoted Montgomery County residents who said that soundtrack evokes “living in a war zone” and “brings up a visceral fear reaction.”

Tell, then show.

Among DC-area avgeeks, reactions to being buzzed by Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps hardware tend to be more of a sigh than a scream. Hobbyist photographer Samer Farha offered a typical sentiment in his reply to my Mastodon post sharing a smartphone picture of a B-52 flyover: “I wish DOD was still publicizing these flyovers so I could be ready with a camera.”

Or as Logan phrased things in an email, “better informing residents about what’s flying over their heads can turn anger into appreciation.”