Flying over impassable territories

[jsimpson7695]

How does flying over impassable territories work? The only place it is mentioned in the rules is on page 8, where it says “Terrain marked with the word ‘impassable’ cannot be moved into by land units. Air units can fly over this terrain but cannot end their movement there”. This wording leaves many questions unanswered with respect to counting air unit movement points. There are a couple possible explanations, as far as I can see:

1. The entire impassable terrain counts as 1 zone for the purpose of counting air unit movement. For example, a plane uses 1 movement point to move from Morocco into the Sahara Desert, and a second to move from the Sahara into Eastern Egypt.

2. The impassable terrain is divided into the territories that make it up. For example, Tripolitania and Chad both extend into the Sahara Desert, so a plane could use 1 movement point to move from Tripolitania to Chad, which shares a border with it.

3. The impassable terrain is still divided into zones making it up, but the edge of the impassable terrain divides each zone in 2. Thus, It would require 1 movement point to fly from the passable part of Tripolitania to the impassable part of Tripolitania, then another to move into the impassable part of Chad, then a 3rd to enter the passable part of Chad.

Another thing to note is that options 1 and 2 both allow the starting Italian fighter in Tripolitania and tactical bomber in Cyrenaica to reach Abyssinia on the first Italian turn, making the battle an easy win for the Italians.

Anyway, which way do you play it? Are there any interpretations that I missed? I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.

[Caesar-Seriona]

If you look at the impassable, you can still see the territory under it. You just treat aircraft as normal when flying over unless you’re using The Hump rule for the Mt. Everest region.

[Trig]

@jsimpson7695 If you look, all impassable terrain is a border terrain. You just ignore it.
On the Italian planes, they can’t fly to Abyssinia, as they cannot fly over neutral UK territory. (Sudan)

[jsimpson7695]

@trig Thanks for the responses!

[Caesar-Seriona]

@jsimpson7695 To clarify also, not only can you NOT fly over UK territory to get to Ethiopia, you also cannot fly through the Suez cannel even though it would technically have it’s own airspace so in order to get aircraft to and from Ethiopia, you need an carrier or a transport to move aircraft down there.