Privatizing Flight Service Stations - this is the kind of crap we deal with nowadays

[karlrschneider]

Safety First?


Somewhere, somehow, Marion Blakey and her Administration seem to have lost sight of their mandate to provide for the safety of American citizens who travel by air. Perhaps it was when she made the decision to get rid of those pesky general aviation aircraft by starting the user-fee juggernaut. Perhaps it was earlier, when someone saw that one of the portions of the FAA, the Flight Service Station system, was carrying out its designated function rapidly, accurately, safely, and generally working in a nearly flawless manner. Naturally the reaction was that such a situation was intolerable. Because ongoing competence in the field of safe aviation could not be allowed to continue, the FAA went through a grueling and expensive process to fix it. In October of 2005, ostensibly to save the taxpayers money, it entered into a $1.7 billion contract to "privatize" (is that really a verb?) a portion of the FAA that worked well. I know, children ... one would think that if private industry could do a government function better than the government, then the FAA would have privatized one of the parts of the FAA that doesn't work. Children, such a thought would require us to apply that evil concept, logic, to the operation of political machinery. Children, you know very well that logic should never be used when traveling through the looking glass into privatization land.


/snip





http://www.avweb.com/news/pilotlounge/pilots_lounge_fss_mess_195387-1.html

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. They just closed the FSS in my state.

Which, presumably, put a bunch of people out of work. Since I can't afford to fly any more anyhow, I don't know how much worse the service is now that the phones are routed to God only knows where (India, some day?). But this is a perfect example of the insane Republican notion of privatizing everything the government does well, extracting a bunch of money from the government, and then doing the job badly by hiring the cheapest possible labor and/or running the leanest possible operation in order to make a profit. No function affecting safety should ever be conducted as a profit-making operation. Nothing good can come from this.

[karlrschneider]

2. It's a cluster----. The other day I filed a FP and when I called center

after takeoff they had no record of it! Luckily the weather was clear when I departed, it would have been just peachy if I was climbing out through clouds and nobody knew who the hell I was. :grr:

[neverforget]

3. Thanks for posting this Karl. As a student pilot I will soon be dealing

with this.