I have just been in Hawaii with the owners of Avalon Airport looking at the Airservices operation of Lihue Tower – very impressive. I will put another post on about this shortly.
Whilst in Honolulu I visited the Automated Flight Service Station. It was staffed by seven personnel at the time of my visit. I was told that at night time, between 10pm and 5am, just one member of staff operates about 30 VHF Flight Service/Flightwatch outlets, plus accepting flight plans, briefing etc by telephone.
It is interesting that the whole US Flight Service System has been contracted out to Lockheed Martin (see
here).
It is important to note that the US system provides briefings by officers who are trained to actually interpret the weather information. You may like to phone this number: 0011 1800 992 27433. Say the word, “Hawaii”, and if the US system understands your Aussie accent you will be put through to the Automated Flight Service Station.
It appears that the Lockheed Martin contract is for about $190 million per year. That would equate with our 5% of traffic to about $10 million in Australia. It would be interesting to see what we spend on our Flightwatch/Flight Service VHF outlets and briefing services.
The US is now going to 18 Automated Flight Service Stations, which is the equivalent of about one in Australia – population/traffic wise – and that is what we have now.
The consoles are set up so a briefing officer can not only accept a flight plan and give weather information by telephone, but can also operate the VHF Flightwatch outlet. Is that what we do here?
In talking to the manager in charge, he said there is certainly no plan by the FAA to remove the separate VHF Flight Service/Flightwatch system. The contract has been given to Lockheed Martin for 10 years.
By the way, I’m not suggesting in Australia that we should look at contracting out the Flightwatch. I think that would be crazy. I believe the best way to do it is to keep it within Airservices as a necessary overhead for providing a safe air traffic control system.
Do others agree?