The end of Flight Service

Effective today, Oakland Flight Service will only provide preflight weather briefings; no other services.  No inflight services, no en route flight advisory service, no flight data, no NOTAMs, no coordinator, no air-to-ground services at all.  The facility is part-time now, which isn't so bad (no more midnight shifts) but from now all everyone will do is to brief pilots.  Hour after hour, day after day, month after month, nothing but briefing.

That ought to do wonders for morale.  It is amazing how LockMart has this uncanny knack for doing everything wrong.  The equipment still doesn't work, the employees at OAK are now glorified call-center reps, and Flight Service has lost half of its traffic by giving the pilots poor service.

Not that LockMart cares.  If fewer pilots are calling in, the company has a better chance of answering the phones and radios in time to meet their performance levels and get their bonuses.  Back in the FAA days, the administrator claimed the system needed to be fixed because it cost more than $25 to provide a pilot weather briefing.  They told us that competition with the private sector would make us more efficient.

First of all, that $25 figure was completely bogus.  It ignored all of the radio contacts, NOTAMs and so on.  I guess we provided all of those for free.  I wonder what the cost per briefing is now, since half of the traffic is gone.  Chances are it's at least $25, and rising.

Not content with driving the pilots away from Flight Service, I'm guessing that LockMart's next moves will be 1) Make part-time briefing-only facilities out of the other "legacy" facilities, and 2) Eventually close all of those facilities and move everyone to the three hubs.

And given the bean-counter mentality at LockMart, they may also decide that since the specialists only provide weather briefings, and no other services, their pay should be downgraded.  After all, why should they get paid so much just to answer the phone?  For that matter, why bother paying the rent and utilities on 19 stations when you only need the three hubs.  And they call this "equal or better service."

So if a pilot takes off from Oakland, and calls Oakland Radio to activate his flight plan, the voice on the radio that answers as Oakland Radio will be a specialist in Prescott, Arizona.  But don't worry, he will have studied the area knowledge for the west coast.  He might even know where the coastal range is, and that some of those low lying stratus clouds may have mountains inside them.  During the summer months, there are some are some very hard clouds here in the Bay area.  But if anything happens, it won't be LockMart's fault.  They will blame the specialist, and you can take that to the bank.