What the @!%#&*%!! Happened to Flight Service?

My subject line is the topic of a meeting at Oakland Airport scheduled for April 21.  The actual title of the gathering is:

"Everything you wanted to know about the new @!%#& Flight Service Stations, but couldn't find anyone to ask!"

I'm not making this up, either.  Here is the link:

http://www.faasafety.gov/SPANS/event_details.aspx?eid=19050

The meeting will be run by a Lockheed Martin PR rep, who will explain how LM managed to totally screw up Flight Service through its own incomptence and greed.  Well, actually I imagine he'll try to spin that to convince everyone they're getting better service now than in the old days when they could actually get through on the phone, and filing a flight plan wasn't like playing Russian Roulette.

That is one assignment I would not want to be tasked with.  But, to quote the announcement's description of Fred Gibbs:

He can usually answer any and all your questions. Fred says, "BRING IT ON"!

Gee, I hope ol' Fred remembers to wear his bulletproof vest that evening.  Out of the 100+ pilots at that meeting, chances are at least one or two might not have received good service lately.

I won't be at the meeting.  I admit it holds a certain morbid fascination, kind of like taking a peek at the aftermath of a car accident, wanting to see just how bad it really is.  But that part of my life is over, and I'm glad I got out when I did.  My last night on the job, I worked until midnight.  Technicians were all over the place, waiting to start ripping systems out of the walls.

I was about one hour from retirement when Seattle Center called, and asked me how they could get in touch with us for traffic at Crescent City.  I told him to call the same line as usual, and with any luck, someone at Prescott, AZ would answer the line.  It was supposed to be transparent.  He said I didn't sound too confident.  No, I told him, I'm not.  There was no doubt in my mind that the new system was going to be a disaster.  In particular the FS21 system was going to be a clusterf-, because one of our guys had been detailed back east for months testing it, and he came back and told us it wouldn't work.  The good news was that I wasn't real concernedabout it because I was retiring in an hour.

The ZSE guy said he had his suspicions to that effect, and congratulated me on my retirement.  All I can say is that everything was working just fine as long as I was at OAK.  And as soon as I left, the whole place literally fell apart.  Clean living, I always say.  Sometimes things just work out.

But it turns out I had some bad information in an earlier blog entry.  It seems they still have to work mids at OAK.  The only redeeming virtue of the whole LM FS21 mess was going to be a part-time schedule, and now that can't even get that right.  One of the guys told me he had thirty (30) briefings on a mid.  Retirement never sounded so good.