Presidential Perspective
By now, most everybody in the country that we represent has a story to share about the shoddy treatment theyve received in recent times from their employer, the Federal Aviation Administration. The morale-deflating tales are endless, but theyre no less shocking, heartbreaking and outrageous to me each time I hear them.
Elsewhere in these pages, you will read about the worsening staffing crisis, the agencys foolish plan for consolidation and co-location of facilities, the new restrictions on the use of Taxi Into Position and Hold and the FAAs relocation of engineers and other NATCA-represented non-controller bargaining unit employees from their important posts in regional offices that the Air Traffic Organization is phasing out in order to create new and cumbersome layers of bureaucracy that will do nothing to improve our National Airspace System.
This is also an agency that I am not making this up is demanding payment from employees for the gasoline it distributed to them during Hurricane Wilma last year employees who risked danger in getting to work when there was no gasoline to be found in all of South Florida. They stood in the face of the wind and rain to get five gallons of gas per day from the agency during the emergency when it was clear that if something wasnt done fast, there would be no way to sustain operations. The FAA acknowledged their contribution not with a letter of thanks for restoring order out of the storms chaos, but rather with a bill for $12.25.
But beyond these examples of FAA folly, it is important to note that this agency is also not fulfilling its responsibility to the public to provide for the best interests of a system that is supposed to ensure the safe, orderly and expeditious flow of air traffic. The agency has seen the results of its inaction and also made several flawed decisions of late, which could well have serious consequences as the busy spring travel season blossoms into a busier summer season. Here are two examples:
** While the agency snubs the Denver TRACON by denying it a modernized radar display system, the antiquated system in use continues to experience frequent reliability problems, including a failure recently that resulted in a close call in the skies above Denver that jeopardized safety. Denver is one of four major TRACONs around the country that use 1970s radar displays called Full Digital ARTS Displays (FDAD). The TRACONs in Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis and St. Louis continue to wait indefinitely to receive a system called Common ARTS Color Displays (ACDs). Replacing the aging FDADs with ACDs is the quickest and most cost-effective way to resolve this issue.
Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives appropriations report provided the necessary funding to replace the aging radar displays at these four aforementioned TRACONs and noted that the FAA had deferred action on replacing these displays for too long. We are still waiting for those ACDs. As Denver TRACONs NATCA Facility Representative Paul Vitale put it, Our facility cannot wait for the red tape to clear or for a major accident to occur over the skies of Denver.
** LINCS (Leased Interfacility NAS Communications System) is the operational nerve center for all major air traffic control communications. LINCS is also the Department of Defenses national security interface with FAA controllers throughout the nation. To handle these missions, LINCS has been built to survive catastrophe and anticipate emergencies. It is built to be ridiculously redundant.
On 9/11, LINCS was the only functioning phone system in New York.
When the FAA decided to put out a proposal for a new telecommunications system, MCI, Lockheed Martin and Harris Corporation bid the work. Unfortunately for MCI, its parent corporation then known as Worldcom was in the news for financial troubles. MCI lost the competition and the FAA began a shift away from the extremely reliable, redundant LINCS system to a new telecommunications infrastructure known as FTI (FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure). Unfortunately for us, this has meant reductions in requirements, redundancy, reliability and margins of safety.
While this agency is making it more and more difficult for us to stay focused on our core mission and sacred trust the safety of the flying public I could not be more proud of our members for continually rising to the occasion to overcome the assortment of challenges and repeated examples of FAA mismanagement that test our skills, our patience and our dedication every day of our professional lives.
We will remain vigilant and to that end, I invite each and every one of you to report to our Safety and Technology Department via the safety hotline at 1-800-266-0895, ext. 72331 any unsafe situation you encounter. We want to keep an open line of communication with the membership in real-time on the problems occurring in the NAS so that we may work on possible solutions and hold this agency accountable for its mismanagement.
