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By AeroCopilot Editorial Team

Airshow Week TFRs: How to Read Them Before You Fly

Airshow season fills the map with temporary flight restrictions. The TFR types every VFR pilot meets in July, how to read the actual NOTAM text, and a pre-flight routine that keeps you out of the news.

It is the busiest airshow week of the year, and the sectional you memorized in the spring is temporarily wrong. Temporary Flight Restrictions appear, move, and expire on their own schedule — and "I didn't know" has never once worked on a certificate action.

The TFRs you will actually meet in July

  • Airshow and aerial demonstration TFRs (91.145). A defined radius and altitude cap around the demonstration area, active during published hours — often daily, often NOT around the clock. The airspace can be open at breakfast and closed at noon.
  • Stadium TFRs (the standing 3-NM/3,000-ft restriction). Active around major sporting events from one hour before to one hour after — the schedule is the trap, not the geography.
  • VIP movement TFRs. Large, fast-appearing, and absolutely enforced. These can materialize with short notice and reshape a whole region's VFR flying for a day.
  • Hazard TFRs — firefighting and disaster response. Summer fire season means these appear with little warning; flying into one endangers the crews working below.

Read the NOTAM, not the summary

The graphic depiction is a starting point, never the authority. The NOTAM text carries the four things that decide your flight: the center point and radius, the altitude cap, the effective times (in UTC — convert carefully), and the exceptions (some TFRs allow transits on a discrete squawk with ATC contact; many do not).

A pre-flight TFR routine that takes three minutes

  1. Check tfr.faa.gov the morning of the flight — not the night before. TFRs are issued continuously.
  2. Get a briefing that includes TFRs along your whole route, not just departure and destination.
  3. Re-check before a delayed departure. A two-hour slip can put you inside a window that was clear when you planned.
  4. Draw the times on your kneeboard in local time, converted from UTC, with the radius and cap next to them.
  5. In flight, when in doubt, ask — flight following makes an accidental TFR penetration dramatically less likely.

AeroCopilot ingests the FAA's TFR feed directly, so active restrictions render on the in-app map with their real geometry and effective times — one glance during planning shows what stands between you and your destination.

Sources

  • FAA Temporary Flight Restrictions — tfr.faa.gov
  • 14 CFR 91.137, 91.141, 91.145 — the TFR regulatory family