How to Keep the News Media Away

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a 12-day no-fly zone in compliance with requests from local [Ferguson, Missouri] police after protests erupted in response to the August 9th police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen. At the time, the official reason given for the restriction was safety precautions.

  RT

Not that anyone believed that. Were there rioters in the sky?

The St. Louis Police department maintained that the restricted fly zone was instituted in response to shots fired at a police helicopter, although they were not able to provide an incident report on the shooting, according to AP.

Next time, they’ll make sure there actually are shots fired at the police helicopter.

FAA air traffic controllers attempted to reword the flight ban, which had initially banned all air traffic in the 37-mile radius, to let commercial flights operate at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, but prohibit other flights, on August 12th, the day after the restriction was first established. Effectively putting an end to media presence in the skies, the amended restriction read, “Only relief aircraft operations under direction of St. Louis County Police Department are authorized in the airspace. Aircraft landing and departing St. Louis Lambert Airport are exempt.”

What’s left? Private planes and news choppers.

An FAA manger was recorded saying that the police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”

[...]

Michael Huerta, an FAA administrator, denied the national agency was compliant in banning media from Ferguson airspace.

“FAA cannot and will never exclusively ban media from covering an event of national significance, and media was never banned from covering the ongoing events in Ferguson in this case,” he said in statement on Sunday.

Riiiiight.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.