FAA sells Flight Service Stations

[wxwatcher]

On Tuesday, February 1, 2005, the FAA announced that they had selected Lockheed-Martin as the winner of the contract for the FAA's flight service stations located in the lower 48 states, Hawaii, and San Juan.

Lockheed will take over the operations of these facilities effective October 1 of this year and intends to reduce the number of stations to 20. The first of these facilities will close in about 18 months and Lockheed will have all initial facility consolidations completed within three years. Lockheed has indicated they will offer jobs to all current flight service employees, but better than 50% of these individuals are eligible for retirement now.

Lockheed and the FAA claim that Lockheed will be able to provide "equal or better service" to what is available from the current system. However, Lockheed's plan includes the reduction or elimination of services which they and the FAA have deemed unimportant to the pilot. A full list of those reductions is supposed to be available in the "near future," but prominent among the ones mentioned so far is EFAS (flight watch) and the ability of a pilot to walk in to a facility and get a briefing or file a flight plan. There is speculation that even DUATS may be eliminated, though that hasn't been confirmed yet.

As for facilities that will be remaining, the ones out here on the west coast are few and far between. San Diego, Oakland, and Seattle are the three locations that will remain open, though not necessarily in their current on-airport locations. A little further east will be Prescott, AZ and Denver.

If anyone wants to see the actual announcement and what information is available, they can to to the FAA's web site for the announcement: www.faa.gov/aca/ and click on the AFSS A76 study links.

The AOPA is supporting this change because they have apparently been told Lockheed will guarantee that any call to a briefer will be answered in 20 seconds or less and any radio call will be answered in 15 seconds or less. AOPA was also told that the briefers would be familiar with the local terrain and micro-climates that could impact the pilot.

My question is this.. If Lockheed is losing close to 50% of the current fss controllers and closing close to two thirds of the current facilities, how do they expect to have the local area expertise needed to do this, much less the human resources to meet the time constraints? We'll just have to wait and see.

I'd like an idea of what you think about this issue so I've included a very simple poll, non-scientific. Please take a few seconds to respond to this statement: I agree with the FAA's decision to sell the flight service stations to Lockheed-Martin..

If you don't like the idea of the FAA selling off your safety related services to the lowest bidder, you may want to write or call you congressmen.