CRS Reports – Week of 2-25-23 – Monitoring Air Space

This week the Congressional Research Service published a report on “Monitoring the Sovereign Skies”. The report looks at issues raised during the recent Chinese ‘weather’ balloon incident about how the US military and civilian air space controllers monitor traffic in the National Air Space. This is a relatively low-tech coverage targeted at law makers.

This report looks at:

• Sovereignty of airspace,

• Aircraft identification and tracking,

• Unmanned balloons,

• Other unmanned aircraft, and

• Air defense identification zones and airspace restrictions.

Interestingly, there is no section dealing with ‘issues for Congress’. Apparently, the author has not seen any indication that Congress might want to legislatively or investigationally address the problem.