walking in a movement area

S

SixPapaCharlie

New member
Whew! What the hell was I thinking?

Plane was crashed upside down on a runway where I was flying today. I was told I could land in the grass. I did and taxied to a parking spot got out and walked towered the accident plane.

Here comes some sort of truck w/ flashing lights easily doing 80 right toward me.

This guy chewed my *** soooooo bad. I was walking on a taxiway as I have done at a hundred uncontrolled fields when I take photos of planes landing and what not.

Apparently this is not only frowned upon at a controlled field but a federal offense?

He said he should be giving me a $500 fine and how the hell am I a pilot and don't know I am not allowed to be standing on a taxiway?


Man, have stood on taxiways for egg drops, fly-ins, and as mentioned before, just to shot photos.

This guy ripped me a new one.

I was nowhere near the accident plane and that was not the issue at all.
He made me get in his truck and he drove me back to my plane.

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Sounds like a reportable pedestrian deviation, but I'm fairly certain the fellow doing the threatening had no power to fine you - just issue a citation. According to the following document on vehicle/pedestrian deviations the event would have first lead to an investigation and probably nothing more than a warning:

http://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/media/vpd_briefing.pdf

My kind of flying rarely takes me into controlled fields, but I did recently fly into one (RHV) where the only way to get from the tie down area I parked at was to cross a named taxiway. And the FBO drove my rental car up to the plane. There was no communication with ground control when we moved both the plane and car to the FBO's parking spots (I had parked in the wrong place.) I would have thought we were in movement areas. I simply followed the FBO guy's lead. No angry mob appeared.
 
MAKG1 said:
Movement areas are marked by dashed single yellow lines. At RHV, only Y and Z and the various runway turnoffs are movement areas. None of the parking areas are, but some of them do have identifiers.
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Ah yes, I just checked the satellite view and see that I had moved out of the movement area for taxi Z as I traveled north to park near the helicopter spots. I was too busy looking for the tie down numbers to notice when I had left the movement area.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Let me ask this.
Is it prohibited at uncontrolled fields and we just get away with it because there is no controller?

Or is the rule that it is okay to be on movement areas at uncontrolled fields but not controlled fields?
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The only applicable FAA regulation I can find is 91.129(i):
§91.129 - Operations in Class D airspace.
...
(i) Takeoff, landing, taxi clearance. No person may, at any airport with an operating control tower, operate an aircraft on a runway or taxiway, or take off or land an aircraft, unless an appropriate clearance is received from ATC. A clearance to “taxi to” the takeoff runway assigned to the aircraft is not a clearance to cross that assigned takeoff runway, or to taxi on that runway at any point, but is a clearance to cross other runways that intersect the taxi route to that assigned takeoff runway. A clearance to “taxi to” any point other than an assigned takeoff runway is clearance to cross all runways that intersect the taxi route to that point. As you can see, there is no mention of pedestrians or ground vehicles. It may be that there is something buried in Part 139 that requires Class B, C, and D airports enact local regs or rules requiring people and their vehicles get ATC approval before entering movement areas, but I'm too lazy to do that research. If that is the case then as a pedestrian you'd be violating a local law - the feds wouldn't seem to have any regulation they could charge you with violating.

Since the whole point of the rules is to make a safer environment, inadequate signage and poor awareness of the rules is a failure of the authorities. You did what I might have done because most of my flying takes me to non-towered airports. I stay off taxiways and runways as much as possible anyway and try to make my way to where I want to go on the ramp while keeping a safe distance from other aircraft.

I found it interesting to search the PDF version of the AIM for the phrase "movement area". Scattered info buried in a sea of information.
 
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