Message posted by Homersonic on February 27, 2003 at 21:18:45 PST:

The one thing that concerns me is that no matter how you slice it, you're gonna run over a major air route. I know that when we're up in the U.P., we not only see a lot of F-16s and the occasional KC-10, but we also see the routes from Pearson International in Toronto out west. All the Air Canada flights (I can vouch for this because I saw Grand Marais out the window of a flight going to Winnipeg) out west, be it to Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, etc. all go over Lake Superior. If you're going over Erie, you're gonna run into traffic from the U.S. to Pearson by the time you hit Lake Ontario.

But I could see a guy flying north of Toronto and Ottawa and sort of slinking by Montreal and going east. That makes a lot of sense. I suppose civilian travel is always a bit of a concern, but there aren't as many flights going to Winnipeg as there are from Chicago to New York.

It's kind of odd, though, that every flight I've taken out of DTW (read Metro Airport in Romulus, MI) has always skirted Lake Erie, even if it's going East, does not go over Lake Erie.

I hope you'll excuse my rambling. But I can definitely say that though the Lakes are used for civilian transit to some extent, they are by and large the domain of the military, and I'm sure you could pry some great stories out of a deckhand on a thousand foo Great Lakes ore boat if you bought him a beer or two.

Again, Superior is the lake I know best, and I can tell you that lakers have general routes that don't take them over vast expanses of the lake. I still think that given the surface area and relative sparseness of population on the shores of Superior and Huron (the second biggest Great Lake in surface area), it makes a lot of sense to chug up there to play with your newest toys.

Erie is closer to Wright Patterson but there are more cities around the shores of Erie than the other lakes mentioned, I could see Erie as a transit route but less of a testing route than Lake Huron or Lake Superior, which are much bigger and have a lot less people around watching the skies. That and the lack of cities = less ambient light = more security for night flights. The same could be said for an overflight of Northeastern Ontario and Quebec.

In Reply to: Re: Military Air corridors over US Midwest posted by October Six on February 27, 2003 at 13:56:46 PST:

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