Flight Service Sigmet

(My answer to Garf on how FSS changes will affect pilots is a bit long. I’m going to split this into two posts)

I’ve covered Garf’s questions a bit on how staffing changes will affect the controllers. How will it affect the pilots? This is a more difficult question to answer, because no matter what the service question, the answer for now will always be the same: we don’t know. How Lockheed Martin will deliver services is still under seal, so we can only guess based on what they’ve told us about the controllers. It seems to be simply a matter of fate at this point.

Let’s take pre-flight calls. LM promises that calls will be routed to a briefer who’s familiar with the area in which the flight will take place. Currently, ‘area’ generally refers to the state that the FSS is in (for Flight Watch, the associated ARTCC airspace). What will the LM areas be? We don’t know. LM will have three geographical Service Areas, Western, Central and Eastern. The controllers have been told that they can becoming qualified in a maximum of three areas. This has lead to speculation that the ‘local areas’ are in fact one-third of the country each. A LM representative has been quoted to the effect that since all the information is built into the new data systems, learning these new areas will be real easy.

Let’s assume for a moment that all the above is true. The first thing that comes to mind is that there will be some ‘knowledge dilution’. Controllers will tell you that it takes some time to become familiar with regional weather patterns and effects. Imagine someone from Dayton, Ohio in short order suddenly becoming ‘experienced’ in Gulf States and New England weather phenomenon in different seasons. Neither pilot or controller should be comfortable with that.

Of course LM could be planning on a larger number of smaller areas. But the smaller the area, the more we can question the limit that each controller can know only three, as well as making it more difficult to meet the promised so-called ‘fast-answering’ metrics with less than half the workforce (more on this later).

The second thing that comes to mind (if the LM quote and assumptions are accurate) is that LM seems to believe that the FSS job is merely a matter of parroting data than tailoring information to pilots that takes into consideration changing weather conditions, inaccurate forecasts, etc. If so, the pilots become even less well-served by a controller work-force that does less for them.

AOPA president Phil Boyer has weighed in on how he expects FSS services to be vastly improved because of the new technologies and promised metrics for fast response to pre-flight and in-flight calls (you can see the full text of his comments here). Again, any of the five bidders for the contract would have accomplished this. But more importantly, Mr. Boyer can’t possibly be speaking from knowledge when he says these things.

Now I’m certain that LM showed Mr. Boyer some wonderful bells and whistles when they briefed him on the equipment they’ve created for FSS use, and there’s little doubt that what he saw is better than what most FSSs have now (aside from OASIS that is in a few stations). But this would be true of any of the five bidders. What we need to realize is that Mr. Boyer has no experience at all delivering air traffic services or using any such equipment to brief pilots. We should largely dismiss his “wow” comment as uninformed and inexpert.

Let us be clear; no Air Traffic Controller currently certified to provide flight services to pilots had input on the LM system or has seen it in action. In fact one could assert that Mr. Boyer saw little more than ‘vaporware’, an untested beta version of a system that has yet to be approved for use or even compatible with the current National Airspace System databases.

I’ll talk about the metrics in the next post.