A pilot's discovery on ForeFlight of an inconsistency between the Seattle/Portland Terminal Area Chart (TAC) and the corresponding Seattle VFR Sectional has surfaced a practical question that touches on chart currency, special use airspace (SUA) depiction standards, and the tools pilots rely on for airspace awareness. Specifically, the Chinook A Military Operations Area (MOA), located west of Paine Field (KPAE) and south of the Whidbey Class C airspace, appears graphically on the TAC but is absent from the sectional covering the same geographic area. The Chinook B MOA, previously charted west of Restricted Area R-6701, is missing from the sectional as well. Both MOAs are still listed in the special use airspace tabular data on the margins of both charts, but ForeFlight's interactive "long press" airspace query—which typically surfaces the name, altitude limits, and active times of any MOA a pilot taps on the moving map—returns nothing for either area on the TAC, suggesting the underlying digital airspace database may have already deprecated these MOAs even though the printed/rendered chart graphic has not caught up.
This kind of discrepancy is more than a curiosity; it goes to the heart of how pilots are expected to identify and avoid (or coordinate transit through) military training airspace. MOAs are established and amended through the FAA's charting cycle in coordination with using agencies (in this case likely a Navy or Air Force unit tied to NAS Whidbey Island operations), and boundary changes, consolidations, or discontinuances don't always propagate simultaneously across every chart product and every EFB vendor's data pipeline. Sectional charts, TACs, and the digital airspace shapefiles that power apps like ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, and FltPlan Go are sourced from the same National Aeronautical Charting Office data, but they are rendered and updated on different production schedules and sometimes different tools within the FAA's own system. A lag or error in one product line—sectional versus TAC versus the SUA text panel versus the queryable database layer—can leave a real gap between what a pilot sees drawn on the map and what is legally and operationally active. For VFR pilots transiting the Puget Sound area near Paine Field, correctly knowing whether Chinook A or B is a live, dashed-magenta hazard or an artifact of an outdated render has direct implications for altitude planning, radio calls to Whidbey Approach, and simple situational awareness around military jet and helicopter traffic.
The right way to resolve this kind of ambiguity is not to trust any single chart rendering but to go to the authoritative source: the FAA's Special Use Airspace website (sua.faa.gov), the Chart Supplement (formerly A/FD) entries for the affected MOAs, and NOTAMs, which will reflect real-time activation status regardless of what any paper or EFB chart shows. Pilots can also query the current edition's effective date and amendment history through the FAA's aeronautical charting bulletins, which explicitly list newly established, modified, or discontinued SUA between chart cycles. If Chinook A and B have genuinely been discontinued, that action would typically be documented in a Federal Register notice or an FAA charting bulletin well before it filters down into consumer EFB software, and the sectional's omission may simply reflect a more current data pull than the TAC, which sometimes lags on tightly localized SUA changes in favor of showing established terminal procedures and obstacle detail more prominently.
More broadly, this incident is a useful reminder for line pilots, flight instructors, and dispatchers alike that EFB airspace layers are a convenience, not a substitute for primary source verification, especially in areas with dense, changeable military airspace like the Pacific Northwest, the high desert Southwest, or the Gulf Coast military training routes. As FAA charting production increasingly digitizes and vendors like Jeppesen and ForeFlight pull from shared but not perfectly synchronized data feeds, cross-chart discrepancies of this type will likely recur. Operators flying near active MOAs, restricted areas, or warning areas should build a habit of cross-checking sectional, TAC, SUA panel data, and NOTAMs before any flight that transits or brushes against these boundaries, and should report suspected charting errors directly to the FAA's Aeronautical Information Services so the anomaly can be corrected at the source rather than propagate through another chart cycle.