Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRAVES of Missouri. I have an amendment that would prohibit funds from being used to enforce congressionally mandated Temporary Flight Restrictions, or TFRs, for sports stadiums. These permanent TFRs, to be quite honest with you, are impractical, they're ineffective, and they create serious problems for hundreds of thousands of pilots, countless air shows, aerial surveyors, and a whole lot of other small businesses and individuals that utilize aviation.

In 2004, Congress mandated the FAA to impose permanent TFRs in the airspace above and around sports stadiums with a seating capacity greater than 30,000. Think of these as restricted airspace bubbles that basically extend 3,000 feet high and they have a 3 1/2 mile-wide radius that is in effect 1 hour prior to the event to 1 hour just after the event. And in any given year, there are roughly 3,000 of these stadium TFRs.

Now, proponents of these claim that they bolster national security and mitigate an aerial threat. I can't help but absolutely laugh at that assertion. First, there's absolutely no realtime mechanism or capability to prevent an aerial attack originating within or outside the 3 1/2 miles at 3,000 feet above ground level, and the logic would apply even if the restrictions were expanded exponentially. In fact, if you take a jet traveling at 500 miles an hour, it's just going to take a few seconds to penetrate that TFR to reach that stadium. It's also very convenient that the proponents of these TFRs are exempt from the restrictions that they successfully sought after.

The bottom line is the FAA doesn't want or need these congressionally mandated TFRs. In fact, the FAA publicly stated they would not issue these TFRs absent the congressional mandate, but, rather, they would use their existing authority to coordinate with local law enforcement to issue them on a case-by-case basis. That's what we're trying to get at.

Mr. Chairman, I'd just like to reiterate these stadium TFRs do nothing to improve security. And I would yield time to anybody out there, any Member, that would like to try and make the argument while keeping a straight face that they do improve security.

These TFRs are about banner towers, which is to prevent what sports groups call ``guerilla advertisers,'' from operating within the airspace around these stadiums. That's all this is about. And what was Congress's solution? We simply gave complete control of the airspace to sports teams and exempted them from their own restrictions. And I think that's wrong.

In light of the fact that I would like to solve this issue eventually instead of trying to ram an issue through or try to push something through that could fail or be passed, I'd rather come up with a good piece of legislation that actually solves the problem and addresses some of the concerns. That's basically what I was trying to do.

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