I write a blog dedicated to the Federal Aviation Administration called the FAA Follies. The FAA has been trashed by the Bush Administration's idiotic political ideology over the past few years. A few other blogs have been covering the story; Don Brown does a great job with his Get The Flick; there's also a couple of newer folks blogging at The Potomac Current and Undertowand Jurassic Bark.
Enough pimping (although seriously, anyone who flies on airplanes or is interested in the FAA should read each of those blogs- and the Follies, of course- every single day) and on to today's entry.
A news item in The Birmingham News on Friday, August 1:
President Dick Cheney landed at Birmingham International Airport about 10:30 a.m. today on his way to Shoal Creek Golf and Country Club in northern Shelby County.
The blue and white Boeing 757 taxied to the Air National Guard building on the north side of airport where the vice president will disembark for his short stay.
Doesn't seem like all that big a deal, right? The Veep zips into town for a quickie stay. What for? Our next story tells us (from the Montgomery Advertiser):
Republican congressional candidate Jay Love of Montgomery was in Shelby County on Friday for a fundraiser featuring Vice President Dick Cheney.
More than 100 people attended the event, which raised more than the goal of $150,000, according to Philip Bryan, spokesman for the Alabama Republican Party.
Bryan said the money will be directed to the party's Victory 08 push, which will help with get out the vote efforts and hiring field representatives.
Okay, seems pretty standard. The Veep flies into town, has some rubber chicken with the local bigwigs in the party, gets his picture taken with a bunch of people who're paying WAY too much for the chance to be next to him, and then presumably jets on out.
Now, we know that there's a lot of work behind the scenes on this. The police and Secret Service no doubt spent tens of thousands on security, but that's just how it goes; everyone does it and even if you despise Cheney (and you should), he's the Vice President of the United States of America and needs the security arrangements.
What SHOULD upset you, though, is the story of the air traffic control work behind the scenes. In fact, the story I'm about to tell you should infuriate you.
A few things you should know, if you're not an air traffic controller or technician. We have a couple of different types of radar systems that we use to guide you home. Terminal radars, or ASR radars, are shorter range but have higher resolution. They're generally located on airports and help controllers by providing excellent radar coverage right down to the ground at the airport; we can also safely move airplanes closer to each other.
Enroute radars (or ARSR radars) are longer range, so they can see further out (up to 200+ miles instead of 50-70 miles) but they don't have the same resolution. With ARSRs, we have to keep the airplanes at least 5 miles apart, and with ASRs we can let them get to within 3 miles of each other.
Terminals can use the enroute radars if need be, but it really slows down the operation- and is less safe. The reason is that the ARSRs don't provide radar coverage down to the ground, so if a terminal is using the ARSR instead of the ASR, the air traffic controllers are effectively blind at or below a certain altitude. This means if there's traffic or if a plane gets off course, the controllers have no way of noticing- and believe me, it's important to have that secondary line of defense backing up the safety operation.
Terminal controllers aren't used to using the enroute radar, so they are working with equipment that operates slower and changes their working methods. Imagine you go to drive your car, and instead of a steering wheel and foot pedals it's got motorcycle controls for the brakes and throttle. You might be able to control the car and steer it, and even get pretty good at it after a while, but at first you're not going to be nearly as safe.
What's more, instead of using 3 miles, they have to use at least 5, and being blind they have to use much more, so the efficiency of the operation goes right into the toilet when the terminal is using enroute radar. (Again, imagine how much more slow and cautious you'd be if your car's controls were suddenly replaced.)
You'll hear the FAA's talking heads spokespeople assure the media that we have all kinds of perfectly safe backups and that the operations aren't affected at all... and they're lying each and every time they do it. It's not as safe and it's not as efficient.
Almost all ATC radars typically run on "commercial" power, meaning the same power system that your home runs on. When there's bad weather in the area, though, we switch our radars over to run on backup generators. The reason is simple- the generator is on-site, so we know that we're not going to risk losing power due to lightning strikes or power lines being knocked down.
Let's go back to Tuesday night/Wednesday morning of last week, July 29/30. It's summer in North America, and as usual there are lines of pretty amazing weather systems moving around the nation. One line of severe weather goes over/through the Birmingham area, so in preparation for that the FAA's technicians put the terminal radar onto backup power.
After the line of storms went over Birmingham, ATC ordered the terminal radar to go back to the normal commercial power. After a while they noticed that the generator was still running. Unfortunately, due in part to the FAA's short staffing the technician work force (it's not just controllers that are badly understaffed in the FAA, folks) nobody was in until Wednesday morning to investigate.
The TechOps folks came in on Wednesday morning and discovered that during the storm, there had been a power outage over most of the area. (Good thing they were on the backup generator!) But when the power came back on, the radar never switched back; the automatic switch was out of service and it would not be able to go back to regular power on its own.
Part was ordered but it wouldn't be available until the following week. In the meanwhile, the Vice President is coming to town before that, on Friday, Aug 1. And here's where things get ugly, folks.
They've got two options on how they can operate. They can go ahead and switch to commercial power and operate on that. It means lesser safety and efficiency during the switchover period, and if the power goes out there's more downtime.
Or they can just keep operating on generator power, which means that there's next to no chance that they'd have to use the enroute radars.
The second option is a lot safer; running on commercial power is risky, especially given the 70% chance of heavy rain and thunderstorms predicted for Wednesday and Thursday. At any point the power could go out and the controllers would be blind until the generator is brought back online and the radar is restarted.
So all this seems to add up to a simple conclusion- stay on the generator, which will almost guarantee the ASR stays up and running. Then there's no problem with the switch being broken, because we're already using the backup.
The terminal controllers would be able to provide the highest quality, safest, most efficient service, and then next week when the part comes in, the tech guys will repair the auto power switch and we'll all be happy.
Here's the big factor, though- the generator uses 5 or 6 gallons of diesel fuel an hour. And diesel is running $4.50 a gallon. That means for 24-hour coverage, it's going to run about 600 bucks a day extra.
And in today's FAA, that's simply not acceptable. Hey, we've got a war to pay for, people.
So here's the plan the FAA's management comes up with instead. They intentionally go to enroute (ARSR) radar for a short while and switch back to commercial power to use on the ASR.
They operate on that until a couple of hours before the Vice President is going to fly in. Then they turn on the generator, and use the ASR on generator power while the VP was in town until after he'd left. This ensures that the VP gets the best quality service we can give.
Once he's gone, they go back to the ASR on the commercial power, going back to money-saving mode. During the switchover periods between commercial and generator, they use the enroute radar, which lessens the quality of safety and efficiency for those who happen to be in the airspace at that point in time.
What does all this technical talk mean?
It means that for 600 dollars a day, the FAA intentionally put the safety and efficiency of the Birmingham airport at risk for the flying public, but when it was the Vice President, they spent the extra money.
And that should really, really, really piss you off. This is the kind of thing that drives the controllersand technicians' unions insane. Neither of them wants this; both of us want the best, safest, most efficient service we can provide to the public.
In our mind, 600 bucks a day isn't really very much money at all to spend to safeguard the lives of the people flying in and around Birmingham. We figure that it's just going to be a week until the new part gets in, let's spend the money.
According to the Birmingham Airport's web page, there's 160 arrivals and departures daily in and out of the airport. They figure they'll serve over 3,000,000 passengers this year. If you divide three million passengers a year by 365 days, you get rougly 8200 passengers a day.
Now, that's no Chicago O'Hare or Atlanta, but that's still quite a few people.
And if you divide the extra cost of the radar being on generator power 24X7 by the number of passengers it would have served, you know what you get?
7 cents.
To save 7 cents a passenger, the FAA intentionally decided to risk a pretty significant degradation of the quality of services and safety.
They're willing to SPEND that 7 cents per person when it's the Vice President, but they wouldn't spend SEVEN LOUSY CENTS per passenger when it was the general flying public.
That's what the "run like a business" mentality of the FAA has brought us to. Oh, you're the Vice President? Sure, you get our best service. What, you're just Joe Schmoe? Sorry, we're not willing to spend even just seven cents to make you safer or ensure your flight comes and goes on time.
Seven. Cents. Per. Passenger.
Welcome to the FAA Follies, ladies and gentlemen.