Saturday, April 01, 2006

 

April Fool

Let us now revisit the promised land of upgraded Flight Service facilities under the direction of the contract awarded to Lockheed Martin by the FAA.

A recap first. The Lockheed plan called for two major equipment upgrades; new computer data architecture (FS21) and voice-switching (i.e., radio calls could be transferred between facilities). These would allow for consolidation to begin six months after the contract went into effect on October 4th, 2005. In other words, right about now, facilities were supposed to start closing their doors. You will also recall that AOPA’s Phil Boyer was given a personal presentation of these new technologies, during which “…all [he] could say was ‘Wow!’” At that time we called these promised upgrades nothing but ‘beta and vapor’ which had never been shown to work in the National Airspace System (NAS).

So what has happened since 10/4/05?

First, Lockheed fired its voice switch sub-contractor, Redflex, last November; things apparently weren’t progressing very well. This effectively placed the voice-switch ability back to square one.

Then, the Boyer-touted FS21 was discovered to be incompatible with the NAS data flow (as we predicted) and could not be readily ‘plugged in.’ Lockheed apparently attempted to buy a working NAS compatible database (called OASIS) from Harris Corporation. Harris had paired with the losing FAA bid to keep Fight Service in the government, and OASIS was already installed at a number of facilities.

One letter we received over the transom stated in part;
“…Lockheed has now briefed the FAA that neither of these functions will be ready until first quarter of ’07! …I know that Lockheed was trying desperately to bring in some outside help to try to stop this huge schedule slip. (My company is a contractor on the FAA’s OASIS program and Lockheed was trying hard to essentially buy our software and expertise --- but they didn’t want to pay anything near what it was worth!)…”

The upshot is what we originally anticipated…major delays due to a lack of system knowledge. The first station closure will be more than a year behind schedule (a generally good thing in our book), and all the promises of cost savings and better technologies remain locked in Mr. Boyer’s dreams.

Comments:
Didn't the FAA "buy out" the Redflex contract for about $10M, so it's failure wouldn't make Lockheed look bad?
 
Just to let you know that someone is still reading... so keep blogging! I'm just waiting for FS21 to go down in flames someday!
 
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