Memorandum Opinion and Order - US District Court - Northern ...

In contrast, Defendants’ analysis of the proposed Lancer MOA/ATCAA indicated thataction Alternative B offered considerable flexibility and was better suited to support the RBTI’straining activities with less potential interference with other aviation in the area. The ARshowed that the FAA indicated to Defendants that, although Alternative B might requirererouting of civil and commercial aircraft, the amount of traffic would be minimal, would beeasily accommodated, and would allow less constrained flow into and out of the trainingairspace. Consequently, Defendants selected Alternative B as the preferred operationalalternative.The FEIS then indicates that Defendants conducted–independently of the preferredoperational alternative–an evaluation of the three action alternatives to determine theenvironmentally preferred alternative. Coarse screening revealed that Alternatives B and C eachhad the potential for fewer and lower magnitude environmental impacts than Alternative D andeach had equal potential for being the environmentally preferred alternative. Fine screening,however, indicated that Alternative B would necessitate substantially less new airspace thanAlternative C and the number of cultural resources potentially affected by the construction of thethreat emitter sites and ESS would be one fewer under Alternative B.Although Defendants’ fine screening of the environmental impacts revealed minordifferences in the potential environmental consequences of Alternatives B and C, Alternative Bdid offer somewhat less potential for adverse environmental impacts, because, among otherthings, modification of the existing MOAs to form the Lancer MOA decreased the land areaunderneath by 801,501 acres. Thus, Alternative B was minimally preferable to Alternative C.53