The past couple of weeks, my forecast discussions have been quite rare. I mentioned in a recent post that I was busy working on an in-depth report, and on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, my "Cover Story" aired in the NECN News at 9, and would rebroadcast during the news the following day. This six minute report focuses on a recent request by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to consolidate meteorologists from the Air Route Traffic Control Centers - 20 across the contiguous United States - to two national centers that would conduct weather analysis and forecasting for the entire National Air Space (NAS). This idea has raised substantial concerns among pilots, air traffic controllers, and meteorologists, but the FAA focuses upon the money saved for the taxpayer, and the utilization of new technology that may limit the number of meteorologists required, and their proximity to the forecast area. Though the Cover Story can be viewed here, there is a plethora of information I've garnered through this report, and far more than could be fit even in a six-minute report. For those of you who are interested, I encourage you to read the entirety of what I've discovered here - a compilation of interviews, both on the record and off, with multiple pilots, air traffic controllers, meteorologists and FAA personnel, that all help to paint a complex picture of what's at work in the FAA and the Forecast for Flight.
Pertinent Links of Interest:
AOPA Statement #1
AOPA Statement #2
Southern Airways Flight 242 photos, map, description and cockpit voice recorder transcript (from Waymarking.com)
Read the complete NTSB safety report for Flight 242 that describes lack of immediate weather information. (from airdisaster.com)
First, I should advise that there is A LOT of information here. The simple and easy summary is, frankly, the six minute report seen in the video and that aired on NECN. Undoubtedly, a number of you will have great interest in this story and its implication for flight safety, however, and I wanted to make all information I found accessible for NECN viewers.
Complete Information:
Sections here: The Proposal, Overall Setup, Recent Changes, Additional Information, Selected Quotes from Interviews
The Proposal:
The FAA is looking to consolidate 84 meteorologists serving at 21 air route traffic control centers (ARTCCs - 20 in the Lower 48, and one in Alaska) to two major centers with a total of 50 meteorologists. One center would be in Kansas City, Missouri, and the other in College Park, Maryland. This would result in no meteorological personnel existing in the ARTCCs, except for Anchorage, Alaska. The FAA stresses there is no final proposal yet, and one major goal is to reduce costs to the taxpayer by trying to find ways to spend tax dollars more wisely, and use the best technology available. The ironic part of this, is that the FAA is requesting this proposal from the National Weather Service, whose meteorologists are the ones currently forecasting at the ARTCCs. So why would they request a plan from the National Weather Service? For the last 30 years, the FAA has contracted the NWS meteorologists to do this work - with the current contract expiring, the FAA has decided to examine their options to find whether there is a more cost-effective solution, and the National Weather Service has been asked to devise a plan to substantially cut costs, else the FAA may have to look elsewhere to find the most cost-effective solution. Because this proposal has not gone to a public review as of yet, organizations such as the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) cannot officially comment or draft a letter to the FAA with their opinion, though they have been using their website to convey their opposition to the plan.
While the FAA insists safety will not be compromised under a consolidated and centralized plan, air traffic controllers, meteorologists and pilots don't agree. These groups insist that the quality of weather information will be degraded and safety issues will result, owing to the elimination of local knowledge of weather patterns - the idea that a meteorologist in New England, for example, will know far more about New England weather than one assigned this region for a day from a national center.
Air traffic controllers and National Weather Service employees have teamed up to issue an assault of public statements speaking out against the plan, with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) sharing the view of the National Weather Service Employees Organization of concern "that the flying public traveling to, from and through this airspace will be at risk due to the FAA's desire to cut cost." [NATCA Statement] Both groups "are opposed to the change due to the potentially dangerous effects the proposal could have on safety."
The FAA, meanwhile, insists that advancements in technology over the past 30 years have been sufficient to allow remote analysis and forecasting of meteorological data. This isn't the first time such a proposal has come to light - similar proposals in 1996 and again in 2003 were opposed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which essentially stopped the proposal dead in its tracks.
There's no word on the NTSB sentiment yet this time around with no public review period yet, but it was the NTSB who first suggested regional meteorologists be a part of the national aviation system after the deadly crash of a DC-9 Southern Airways plane in New Hope, Georgia, on April 4 1977. The NTSB safety report suggested for the second time that the FAA overhaul accessibility of immediate weather information, after it was determined that the flight crew was not made aware of the severity of developing thunderstorms.
Overall Setup:
The National Air Space is covered by a number of FAA centers. In addition to airport towers, a more local monitoring center is the Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility (TRAC), covering an area of about 40 miles and up to ten thousand feet. Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) cover a much larger area, including major airports, filling in the holes that TRAC facilities don't cover, and airplanes flying above 10,000 feet in altitude. The Boston Route Traffic Control Center, located in Nashua, New Hampshire, is broken into five sectors, A through E, covering all of New England and much of Upstate New York. The meteorologists at each ARTCC are referred to as Center Weather Service Unit (CWSU) Meteorologists, and are responsible for issuing Center Weather Advisories, Meteorological Impact Statements, SIGMETs (Significant Meteorological Event), and meeting with controllers via stand-up briefings to the managers of each sector twice per day, in the morning and afternoon. These CWSU meteorologists also issue meteorological impact statements and focus largely on short-fused weather events like convective development, fog bank development, localized wind patterns, etc., and work with the Traffic Management Unit (TMU) to limit delays, mileage, etc., which often can cost airlines - and therefore passengers - money.
CWSU meteorologists are typically staffed 6 AM to 9 PM, though meteorologists do stay overnight for significant weather. Meanwhile, the Aviation Weather Center is a national center from the government that is always issuing special weather advisories for larger weather systems, and local National Weather Service Offices provide airport-specific forecasts. Though there is a national Command Center that oversees the National Air Space, including airplane flow management across the country, there are few if any actual meteorologists at this facility - rather, there are flight service individuals who gather weather information and interpret data to coordinate traffic management due to low clouds, poor visibility, lowering cloud heights, and other conditions referred to in aviation as "Instrumental Flight Rules."
Recent Changes:
Flight Services (FSS) provides general weather "strips," or advisories to pilots, along with general weather briefings. There was a time when these were issued by National Weather Service meteorologists, but in 2007 these services were privatized by the FAA - contracted out to Lockheed Martin, instead. There has been some opposition to this change, as Lockheed Martin consolidated to one center, and cut a number of meteorologists who had been "grandfathered" into the program. Additionally, pilots were discouraged by poor quality and long wait times with the privatization, specifically citing flight progress reports and pilot reports (PIREPs) in conversations with me. The FAA acknowledges there were problems when the program launched, but believes a system for identifying problems has been established, and hopes pilots will begin using this service again. In conversations I had with ARTCC and TRAC controllers, and with pilots, I learned that many are discouraged by the significant delay in relaying pilot reports in a timely fashion, and have great concern the elimination of meteorologists from the local centers will mean a similar fate on the short-fused weather events those CWSU meteorologists cover.
Additional Pertinent Information:
In letter to then FAA Administrator Marion Blakey in April 2007, Daniel Inouye, Chair of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation wrote “The Committee also has grave concerns over the safety and wisdom of removing meteorologists from the ARTCCs.”
In 2006, FAA contracted with Weather News International to conduct an assessment of a remote delivery platform. WNI found “a common issue discovered by the study’s research was the requirement for local knowledge,” expanding “This applies to both the microclimates and the traffic flow within a specific ARTCC’s airspace,” citing the intimate knowledge of both weather, traffic flow patterns and capacity.
“The Committee believes that the FAA should focus its efforts on working with the NWS to enhance the services provided by its meteorologists in situ, rather than considering proposals to obtain meteorological support for the ARTCCs from off-site, whether from the NWS or the private sector.”
Interviews:
I conducted a series of interviews on the record for this report. The following are some of the more intriguing quotes, unaltered.
Bill McGowan is featured in the report - a 30 year air traffic controller who is an advocate for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
“There’s been a large difference in the services that we’ve gotten from flight services. We’ve seen from the pilots they have a rather lengthy time trying to get a hold of the flight service station because they’ve been consolidated – they’ve been moved out of the New England area to centralized locations. There’s been problems with the flight service stations contacting the controllers and oftentimes, the lack of their general knowledge of the area is blatant. Whether it’s calling a sector in Maine for a cancelation or a report of an airport in Basin Harbor, VT, or calling a sector on the Cape for an airport that’s located in Maine."
“sometimes it can take as long as 20, 30, 40 minutes for us to get the relay because it’s going through all the internal channels. So…there’s been a large…I think there’s been a large degradation in the service that’s been provided to the user once they decided to move the flight service stations out of the local areas.”
“We use weather on a real-time basis. As a controller, I’m very tactical in my thinking: my world goes to my sector boundaries. I’m looking at…I don’t pay any attention to it until it’s knocking at the door. By that time, it’s really too late for me to manage my flow"
“If you move them out of the center, we don’t have that, we don’t have that intimacy, we don’t have that working hand-in-hand with them. There are times when, working with the in-house meteorologist, he’s literally at my elbow, he’s standing behind me in the aisle, and he may come down, he may be polling, he may be asking: ‘Ask that guy over Berlin what his ride’s like at 34, or how about this guy over Bangor?’ So he’s shopping for the weather. I don’t think…I KNOW that we won’t get that if we’re dialing, you know, 1-800-GET-WEATHER and we have a centralized location in Kansas City to be able to call them and ask them what we’re getting. I can’t imagine that the generic product that we would get from Kansas City is going to do any real-time use for us being at the sector. We need it now. So, if we get a fax from them daily or some sort of a generic update, if they want to save money, cut out the back page of USA today and just tape it to the sector, cuz that’s about how useful it is.”
“There’s going to be times if you have a weather related emergency, which is what precipitated bringing the meteorologists in when we had the Southern Airways DC-9 crash down in Georgia in ’77, there’s a real bite in the safety margin not having them there."
“There’s going to be delays with time, delays with fuel, missed connections. So, I think that any savings that they think there are going to be to the taxpayer, is really just going to be shed off onto the users, where the airlines are going to be buying this, and they’re the ones who are going to be paying the cost – not just for the safety issue, but for the expense of the extra flights that are going to be now getting to the sector and then diverting, rather than diverting strategically when they’re out over Kennedy or they’re out over Albany, NY, which would make much more sense.”
“And when we’re going to need weather information, we’re going to need it literally within a minute’s time – I mean literally within 60 seconds time. We work on that type of a time scale. So, not having that available – not having somebody be able to come down, whether it’s a lost aircraft if we get into that situation where it’s really a weather related emergency, someone stuck on top, somebody’s picking up ice……"
“The meteorologists in Kansas City or College Park or wherever they’re going to have them, will have the technical knowledge, but they’re not going to have the local base knowledge. They’ll be able to tell us what the weather system is going to do and where it’s going to go, but if you want somebody who’s walking hand in hand with the controller, you need somebody who understands what that flow is. Not just where the weather’s going to be, but how that’s going to impact our flow.”
“Every time we have bad weather it’s gonna be having an hourly effect upon our traffic”
“I understand that they want to save money, but it just doesn’t seem that taking the Weather Service out of aviation, when weather is always in the forefront of aviation safety – and as recently as crashes we’ve had out in Buffalo in the past three weeks – that is just seems so shortsighted to take away having that intimate knowledge in the larger facilities and now trying to consolidate it for the sake of saving a few dollars…it just seems awful short sighted.”
John Stansfield, a meteorologist at the Boston ARTCC has been forecasting aviation weather for 30 of his 40 year career, and spoke to me as the site Steward for the National Weather Service Employees Organization.
“What is characteristic in meteorology and forecasting, specifically is that the further away you try to forecast, the more difficult it is. So it’s very important that you have a team of meteorologists zeroed-in, you might say, in that particular area, to get the greatest benefit.”
“You get to a point where you reach the limit that can be effectively accomplished as far as forecasting ability. I mean, I’ve been in the business now for just about 40 years and I know that for an absolute fact, that the further away you are, the more difficult it is.”
“I am very familiar with what goes on in New England and New York – all local weather patterns, and that. Whether it’s fogs in the valley, the lake effect snows affecting Central New York off Lake Ontario, the fogs on Cape Cod and the offshore Islands – whatever it is, we’re very familiar with. For a centralized location, I would suddenly not only have to know that, but I’d have to become familiar with what is the usual patterns on the west coast, whether it’s Washington State or Oregon or California, and places in between. And you get to a point where one person could not handle that vast area in a timely fashion.”
“Well, I do believe that absolutely [that safety will be jeopardized under the proposed consolidation]. And the reason why is because of the fact that the air traffic controllers, and that, rely on the on-site, immediate expertise that we’re able to give them.”
“One example that comes to mind is a general aviation aircraft that was in trouble in the Keene area, lost above the clouds – it was a low stratus deck……the controllers came to me and said ‘Where can we send this aircraft?’……I knew that the stratus and fog bank that was along the CT River was starting to erode due to the heating of the day…so I told the controllers, I said, ‘That would be the best place, send them towards Westfield or Westover or Bradley,’ and they turned the plane and sure enough……he started seeing the ground…….and he landed safely.”
“If the aircraft was getting low on fuel, that would have been real critical. Now we’re talking seconds.”
“The air traffic controllers, supervisors and that, they have told me that they depend a lot when they talk to us in situations, they depend on our facial expressions, our body language. How they can determine the urgency of a situation by how we express the situation.”
Aidan Seltsam-Wilps is Chief Flight Instructor and Director of Flight Education at the Daniel Webster College School of Aviation Sciences.
“We are still experiencing a marked loss in local knowledge and local understanding of either weather patterns or notices to airmen (NOTAMs) in the local area. We’re still struggling with that.”
“Seconds ARE the matter of life and death, when you’re talking about aviation.”
“I would have serious concerns taking my directions about how to drive through Boston at rush hour from someone halfway across the country reading Google Maps directions to me. I would much rather trust my life and my situation to say a local cab driver or a local ambulance driver that knows those streets inside and out, and knows what’s going on day-to-day……there’s simply no substitute for local experience.”
“[Would you trust a centralized system?] I would – if I were assured that the system was in place to guarantee the same level of information……but we cannot be allured by technology as a substitute for experience and understanding – human understanding.”
“I can see a potential for mismanagement, or a potential for a system to be allured by cost-saving measures and overlook the safety impact. I hope that doesn’t happen.”
“I hope that our lawmakers, the FAA administrators, and the aviation community really pays attention to the potential drawbacks as well as the potential benefits of a proposal like this. Cutting back, scaling back and saving money isn’t the critical element.”
FAA Spokesperson Jim Peters conducted a telephone interview with me after the preceding interviews had been conducted, and had the opportunity to voice the viewpoint of the FAA:
"The agreement that we had with the NWS expired in Sept. So we asked the NWS to take a look at the operation as it exists now and whether or not things could change in light of the fact that there's new technology that evolved over the last 30 years since the agreement's been in place, as well as to consider, would there be any associated cost savings to the tax payer if a consolidation plan were to be put in place."
"We're leaving those details [how much money will be saved by the proposal] up to the NWS to incorporate into their proposal, then we'll take a look at it and go from there."
"We've asked them to take a look at the operation to see what could be done to maintain safety, provide increased services, at a reduced cost to the taxpayer. That's one of the things we're looking for is to save some money with this operation."
"Anytime you're proposing to change the way aviation information is delivered to the user, concerns are always raised that it may not provide the same level of information needs, or may not meet the information needs of the pilots who use the services of Lockheed Martin."
"I would encourage general aviation pilots to continue to use the service." [Lockheed Martin consolidated flight briefings]
"The proposal will be reviewed by the NTSB, which is the independent federal agency that conducts transportation accidents. The FAA will also conduct a safety management review of the proposal, to identify any potential risks associated with the proposal. And we'll also do a pilot program just to ensure that the levels of safety that we now have in the system, and the delivery of the real-time weather that's needed by our controllers to advise crews remains in place."
"We don't see that there's gonna be a degradation of service, or that safety would be impacted. And again, I just want to stress that before anything happens, the NTSB will review the proposal to ensure that safety is maintained, that the necessary weather information continues to be delievered directly to the air traffic controller who needs it, and the FAA safety assessment will also be conducted to assess the proposal and to ID any potential risks which may need to be mitigated."
"Even though the consolidation may happen, the weather information that would be provided to our controllers at Boston Center in Nashua is the same weather information that they now get from the NWS weather people at the center. So we don't see any change in that happening."
"Our controllers do get real time weather delivered to their workstation. 'The radar and the satellite' Right. Under the proposal, our controllers if the need were to arise, would have direct access to either one of the two NWS centers that would be built under this proposal. We would pick up the phone. It would be the same as delivering the weather information to a pilot in the air. The controllers would talk to the NWS at either one of the two centers, and would use that information in their conversation with pilots."
"[Will safety be compromised?] Absolutely not, Matt. We believe the safety of the system; the reliability of the weather information that would be delivered to the controller, would be enhanced, and that safety would not be compromised at all."
"Technology has evolved over the last three decades- the period of time that this agreement has been in place - and we think that technology can be employed in a very effective way, to provide real-time weather information to our controllers at our centers, as well as to save money for the taxpayers. I think that's one of the things that, as a federal agency, we are obligated to study. And again, nothing's going to happen until the NTSB reviews this proposal. If it has concerns, it'll be raised with the agency..."
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