The FAA Follies

I wish that’s what the headline read. Unfortunately, in government-ese, that’s a tad too blunt, and instead of just laying it out there like that, we read stuff that comes across differently.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up a minute here.

There are meteorologists- real ones, not the guys you see in TV- who work in the FAA’s enroute control centers. Here at Seattle Center (ZSE), for example, we’ve got 4 or 5 of them. (Or maybe it’s 3, can’t recall for sure right now.) They are National Weather Service Employees; they have advanced degrees and often decades of experience in forecasting weather, particularly in the local areas that they cover.

Again, as an example, ZSE has some interesting and weird airspace and weather conditions; the Puget Sound convergence zone, for example, can be the difference between an arrival rate as low as 32 or as much as 44, just depending on how the winds come together over our heads. Our weather folks are pretty dang good at making the call on what’s going on, when the fog will get bad or get better, etc.

Where did these meteorologists come from? Why, I’m glad you asked. From the FAA’s Chronological History for April 17, 1978 (and with a hat tip to Don Brown, who’s a bit of a nut for the FAA’s history document):

Apr 17, 1978: National Weather Service meteorologists began working at 13 of FAA’s Air Route Traffic Control Centers under a recently signed agreement between the two agencies. At each of those centers, a team of three NWS meteorologists provided information on hazardous weather throughout the day to center controllers, as well as to FAA towers and flight service stations. FAA provided each center with new equipment for receiving data from NWS weather radar and satellites. This new program was part of a general effort to provide pilots with more en route weather information, since the lack of accurate knowledge of hazardous weather, particularly thunderstorms, had been found responsible for several air crashes (see May 19, 1977). NWS meteorologists were already on duty at FAA’s national flow control center in Washington, and by Nov 1980 they were stationed at all U.S. mainland en route centers.

Hmmm… when you go to the entry for May 19, 1977, it refers to crashes on July 23, 1973 and April 4, 1977. Let’s have a quick look at those entries, shall we?

Jul 23, 1973: An Ozark Airlines Fairchild-Hiller 227B crashed 2.3 miles from St. Louis airport, killing 38 of the 44 persons aboard. The National Transportation Safety Board cited the probable cause as encounter with a downdraft following the captain’s decision to conduct an instrument approach during a thunderstorm. This decision was probably influenced by lack of a timely severe weather warning from the National Weather Service and the improper assessment of weather conditions by flightcrew and flight dispatcher. The Board’s recommendations included a system to improve the dissemination of severe weather information.

Apr 4, 1977: A Southern Airways DC-9 crashed near New Hope, Ga. The pilot attempted an emergency landing on a highway, but the aircraft broke apart and caught fire. The accident killed 62 of the 85 persons aboard, as well as 8 persons on the ground. In addition, one passenger and one person injured on the ground died about a month later. The National Transportation Safety Board cited the probable cause of the crash as the total and unique loss of thrust after the engines ingested massive amounts of water and hail as the aircraft penetrated an area of severe thunderstorms. As contributory causes, the NTSB listed: failure of the airline’s dispatch system to provide up-to-date severe weather data; the captain’s reliance on airborne weather radar to enter a thunderstorm area; and FAA’s lack of a system for disseminating real-time hazardous weather warnings.

So what we learn from history (unless we’re stupid and think we don’t have anything to learn from history, which means we’re doomed to repeat it) is that the FAA needs a system for identifying, recognizing, and disseminating information about severe and hazardous weather. This needs to be quick, responsive, and effective, because if it isn’t, people on airplanes and even people on the ground die.

The FAA has wanted, for several years, to get rid of the meteorologists that work in the enroute control centers.

Why? Well, you can guess- because they cost money. The FAA’s plan is to consolidate these weather folks into just two locations, one in College Park, Maryland, and the other in Kansas City. This will save a bunch of money because the agency figures we won’t need as many of these meteorologists, and they’ll be able to serve the entire nation.

Naturally, the unions supporting the meteorologists aren’t happy about this move. Bad enough that some of them would lose their jobs under the plan, but those that are left would have to uproot their families and lives to move across the nation.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the controllers’ union, is also against this plan. Why? Union solidarity? No… because they know what any person with common sense knows: This plan will lead to reduced service quality and availability.

This all leads me to what a government expert on the matter had to say about the FAA’s plan:

The FAA and the NWS “have not defined a common outcome, established joint strategies to achieve the outcome, or agreed upon agency responsibilities,” according to David A. Powner, GAO’s director of information technology management issues.

“Any changes to the current structure could degrade aviation operations and safety — and the agencies may not know it,” according to his prepared testimony.

Or, as I would put it… these clowns don’t know what they’re doing.

They don’t know what the “outcome” of this is (in other words, they don’t even really know why they’re doing it).

They don’t have strategies to get to the outcome that they don’t have. (In other words, they don’t even know how they’re going to get to the outcome that they haven’t defined yet.)

They don’t have any agreement that defines who’s responsible for what. (In other words, nobody can be blamed for not doing their jobs- because nobody’s jobs are actually defined.)

And the coup de grace- changing what we have now might lead to reduced safety and worse operations, and the FAA and NWS wouldn’t know it if that happened. (No translation needed on this one.)

Is it any wonder that the employees of the FAA (and, for that matter, the NWS) have so little faith in their leadership?

This is the kind of crap that’s happened all over the FAA over the past several years. Some managerial type gets a wild hair up their butt; they see how much money is going to, say, meteorologists, and they figure “hey, if we fired a bunch of them and moved the rest all to one or two places, we could just do the weather from there and save a bunch of money!” Boom, that’s the plan.

No consideration of what they’re actually doing. No consideration of how those meteorologists got there in the first place. No consideration of whether or not a guy sitting in Kansas City, responsible for trying to predict the weather across the United States west of the Mississippi, can possibly describe to the folks at ZSE whether or not the convergence zone will settle in over Everett (meaning a 44 rate at SEA) or if it’ll be over the airport (meaning a 28 rate and possible go-arounds).

And when the agency’s employees try to point this out to the leadership, they’re seen as being annoyances that are merely trying to cause trouble. Their concerns are blown off because “that’s just the union talking”.

These clowns don’t know what they’re doing.