Air carriers lobby to reopen FAA stations in Nome and Kotzebue

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Flight Service Stations in Nome and Kotzebue have been closed for several weeks now with no clear timeframe if or when the offices will reopen, causing alarm in the aviation industry serving western Alaska.
The Alaska Air Carriers Association, keenly aware of the issue, sent  a letter to the Alaska delegation with the urgent request to restore the Nome and Kotzebue flight service stations.
The association’s Executive Director Will Day said in the letter that the closures have “created a significant gap in critical aviation services across western Alaska.”
The FAA’s Flight Service Stations, FSS for short, are responsible for flight plan filing, traffic advisories and communication of weather and runway conditions.
The official confirmation that the FSS is closed was issued on June 5 in a Notice to Airmen, an advisory feature on the Federal Aviation Administration’s website.
The Fairbanks FSS had to step in and added Nome and Kotzebue to their service area. “The implication is that without a working flight service station in both locations, it is more difficult to dispatch and to have IFR [Instrument Flight Rules] aircraft land, which means when the weather is bad, it becomes harder to access flights,” Will Day said in an interview with the Nugget. “Practically speaking, it reduces the reliability of flights coming and going on time or leaving at all.”
In the letter he wrote that operators are already reporting that this consolidation is overloading the Fairbanks FSS, resulting in degraded service levels, delays and reduced operational effectiveness.
In addition to flight plan filing and traffic advisories, FSS staff provided weather and runway conditions. “Without local personnel, certain capabilities – such as runway occupancy checks – are not longer available, already prompting changes to instrument approach minimums,” the letter says.
“The degradation of these services directly affects the safety and reliability of aviation operations and, by extension, the well-being of the communities we serve,” it reads.
The letter says that the “FAA has indicated these closures are related to an internal personnel matter, no timeline has been provided for the restoration of service. This uncertainty compounds the operational and safety challenges already being experienced.”
The Nome Nugget has repeatedly reached out to the FAA with requests for information on the duration or reason of the closure. The emails were acknowledged but the FAA provided no concrete answers.
The letter asked the Alaska delegation to assist with finding immediate clarification on the scope and duration of the closures; urging the restoration of the FSS in Nome and Kotzebue as soon as possible and that Alaska’s unique aviation needs are “fully accounted for in any interim or long-term service plan.”
Amanda Coyne with Senator Dan Sullivan’s office said in a statement to the Nugget that they are aware of the situation but have yet to receive clarity on the issue. “While we have had some preliminary feedback from the FAA, Senator Sullivan’s office is continuing discussions to determine a clear timeline for restoring normal operations and an outline for specific safety and operational mitigations,” Coyne said. “We will provide updates as soon as we receive a substantive response.”
Joseph Plesha, a spokesperson for Senator Lisa Murkowski said that they are in contact with the FAA, Alaska Airlines and the Alaska Air Carriers Association and confirmed that the Flight Service Station in Fairbanks was providing interim coverage. “It is critical that the FAA addresses this staffing shortage as quickly as possible, while keeping the public informed of any further service disruptions,” he said by email. 
The Nugget reached out to the office of Representative Nick Begich and did not receive a response as of press time.

Crucial for western Alaska’s aviation
Day, with the Alaska Air Carriers Association, explained that the flight service stations are also important when it comes to search and rescue missions. “If you have an aircraft that goes missing and does not arrive at the time it’s scheduled to arrive, after a specific amount of time Flight Service tracks and initiates search and rescue. It plays a critical role when it comes to finding lost aircraft,” he said. “You have to have the boots on the ground, actual people who are familiar with those locations, because when you remove those folks, you miss a lot of key information that you just cannot get from somewhere like Fairbanks.”
The reason for Alaska Airlines’ cancelation of several flights was due to the combination of the FSS closure and the National Weather Service's weather reporting failure. When the weather observation system at the Nome airport, called an Automated Surface Observing System, or ASOS, failed to reliably report visibility, there was no one at the FSS to relay information to planes. The result: Alaska Airlines canceled three passenger flights and two freighters bound for Nome from May 30 through June 4.
Tim Thompson with Alaska Airlines explained on June 12 that Alaska Airlines is required per federal regulations to have a surface weather report that includes time, date, temperature, wind conditions and visibility. “If the automated weather report is missing any of the required elements, an FAA-approved weather observer may augment the report,” he said in a statement to the Nugget. “Last week, the visibility was missing from the automated report and the FSS was closed so there were no approved weather observers on site to provide the visibility.”
The ASOS at the Nome airport is owned and maintained by the National Weather Service and has since been fixed, according to Erica Grow Cei, a spokesperson for the weather service.

Forward looking
Northern Air Cargo has been able to continue to fly into Nome despite the FSS closure and the ASOS failure to report visibility. Brian Stroble, Director of Flight Following with NAC in Anchorage told the Nugget that a public law specific to Alaska allowed the development of a special program that is used by NAC. In a nutshell, the program allows their planes to fly into Nome even if the weather reporting is down and the FSS is closed. “It’s a program called STOP, Special Terminal Operation Procedures, that allows us to operate into places that aren’t reporting current weather that we would normally get from the ASOS,” Stroble said in an interview with the Nugget. The reality of the aging weather reporting systems being unreliably functioning all across the state, NAC saw the need to come up with a solution and rolled out the STOP program last year. Stroble explained that it is a complex program – NAC had to write the manual for it, get it FAA-approved and then train both pilots and on-the-ground personnel how to use it. It utilizes Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis, a fancy word for a high-resolution weather reporting system giving real-time estimates of surface conditions like temperature, humidity, ski conditions and wind speeds.
In addition, they use FAA webcams and a few other FAA weather source products report weather data. “Basically we use a combination of things to become our own weather observers and put information together to build our current report that we need,” Stroble said.
Stroble added that a FAA official reached out to NAC’s chief pilot a few weeks ago to inform her that the FSS closure is continual. No timeline was provided to NAC either and the airlines go by the posted Notices to Airmen, NOTAM, for short that are updated every two weeks. 
Brian Weckwerth, Director of Safety at Bering Air, said that Bering Air operates under Part 135 of the Federal Aviation Regulations, meaning that their specifications are different from larger carriers like Alaska Airlines, although they still need automated weather observations when the conditions get bad. “We can basically just kind of call the visibility based on our own observations,” said Weckwerth.
When the FSS station in Nome is staffed, Bering Air can rely on them for an extra level of eyes on air traffic. “When the Flight Service Station is open here, and there are people looking out the windows over there, and we call in, they will give the traffic advisory of all the aircraft that are in the area,” he said. “It gives us a bigger sight picture of what’s really going on. We don’t have that now, and you can’t get that from Fairbanks, because they’re not seeing it.”
A FSS presence in Fairbanks renders Nome and Kotzebue operations inefficient. “It’s way better to have the human presence with a busy airport like here in Nome and in Kotzebue,” said Weckwerth. “We need them back. It’s that simple. We rely on them heavily as pilots, and as a result, the entire public has to rely on it, too.”
“At the end of the day, summing it up, it’s just so less efficient,” said Weckwerth. “Anytime you diminish efficiency, you diminish safety.”