Immediately after the attack, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), acting on instructions from the National Security Council (NSC), grounded all general aviation aircraft.These included aircraft used for aerial photography and digital airborne remote sensing.MAPPS embarked a campaign to permit aerial geospatial data collection flights to resume by working with the FAA, NSC, Congress and numerous Federal mapping agencies.General aviation operations were permitted to resume first in rural areas, then 5 major metropolitan areas were opened beginning October 15, and, this week, operations were permitted to resume in an additional 12 cities.

Only Boston, New York City and Washington, DC continue to operate under restrictions that prohibit flight operations under "visual flight rules" (VFR), which govern virtually all aerial photo missions.MAPPS is continuing to work with FAA and NSC to open this air space.

"We are pleased that most of our members are back in the air.A tremendous backlog of projects resulted from the more than 1-month shutdown and these firms are working hard to get these projects flown.We appreciate the difficult security issues our government officials have to deal with, but we are pleased they have been responsive to MAPPS and have permitted the resumption of most aerial photo operations.We are particularly pleased that FAA and NSC heeded the MAPPS message about the nature of aerial photography and the impact these services have on development and resource management. Some operations, such a radio and TV traffic reports, banner towing and site-seeing operations are still grounded in more than 30 major metropolitan areas.Had it not been for the MAPPS lobbying effort, aerial photography could easily have been lumped with these activities and remained grounded today," according to MAPPS Executive Director John Palatiello.

The metro areas opened this week were:

Monday, October 22
Atlanta, Georgia; Las Vegas, Nevada; Los Angeles, California; Miami, Florida;
San Francisco, California.

Tuesday, October 23
Denver, Colorado; Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania; San Diego, California.

Wednesday, October 24
Chicago, Illinois; Orlando, Florida.

MAPPS is a national trade association of more than 150 private firms engaged in mapping, aerial photography, GIS, remote sensing and related geospatial services.

For access to all the MAPPS notices on the FAA regulation, go to http://www.mapps.org and click on the September 11 icon. For media inquiries or further information contact:
John Palatiello
MAPPS
1760 Reston Parkway, Suite 515
Reston VA 20190
(703) 787-6996
info@mapps.org
www.mapps.org