Flight Service Sigmet

Millville (MIV) Flight Service in New Jersey suffered a roof collapse this past week. Thankfully no one was injured, but the future status of the operation is in question. One authority asserts that the building will be open again in two weeks. Another says that it may not be ready until sometime after the Lockheed Martin contract begins. If the latter is true what happens to the controllers? MIV is one of the stations that will close sometime within the first 18 months of the contract. Will the controllers be transferred to another facility, held over on administrative leave or simply let go immediately instead of 6-18 months down the road? Temporary facilities are possible and have been done before, but for now, if you’re in New Jersey or one of the surrounding states whose Flight Service is filling the gap, the system might be a bit slow for a while.

One of MIV’s controllers, ‘RK’, left the following comment under the previous post:

Do you have an opinion on the catastrophic closure of MIV AFSS? It seems that
the traffic that is being sent to other stations is really causing havoc!!!
Could this be what we'll be in for when LM closes the so called "Leprosy
Stations"?

(Note: the term ‘leprosy station’ is an inside joke referring to the 38 FSSs that will close under the contract as opposed to the 17 ‘legacy stations’ that will remain open)

We find it hard to view the two situations as analogous. One is a catastrophic failure occurring in a moment, while the other is a planned event scheduled to occur over months. Still, RK’s point is not to be lightly dismissed. Flight Service areas tend to be unique in few or many ways. Even making operations and methodologies uniform over all stations won’t erase these variables. We discussed before how we expect pilot contacts in general to become longer and more involved (Mythical Metrics, 8/11). Keeping all this in mind, RK’s question can address two different aspects of the same problem: planned consolidation vs. a sudden loss of a facility.

An accurate answer to the first situation isn’t easy to come by. Since the contract is still under seal we have no way of knowing how Lockheed will operate Flight Service; what will the 'local' areas be? Will controllers be trained in non-contiguous areas? What services will the legacy stations provide? We are still convinced that Lockheed does not understand the nature of the service they are about to start providing. This is not entirely their fault since they’ve relied mostly on the FAA bureaucracy to fill them in. But it does explain why they seem to think Flight Service is the aviation equivalent of home computer tech support, with little difference between the expectations of pilots in New England vs. Texas, or Indiana vs. Washington. The 18 month consolidation will probably be smooth from a hardware standpoint. In terms of the software, service and pilot satisfaction however, even the AOPA has gone from “…all I can say is ‘wow’” to “…there may be some service glitches...” during the change-over.

Second, should one of the 20 end-state facilities be taken out of commission, how will it affect services (for comparison it should be mentioned that MIV is the 12th busiest FSS among the 61 in the nation)? Remember that there will be less than half the controllers than exist now. And if a disabled facility’s controllers constitute a relatively large portion of those available to service a particular area, how will the promised metrics be maintained?

Again, the answer lies in the still sealed contract. It would not be surprising if there were a clause that releases Lockheed from the metrics should some ‘act of God’ take a station off-line. But even given that the controllers serving a particular area will likely be spread out among at least three facilities (and we would guess more), there’s little doubt that pilots will notice delays in service. But it probably will not be of the same magnitude that they’re currently experiencing in and around New Jersey.