CONTRACTOR ERROR CUTS COMMUNICATION TO AOCC
- Details
- Published: July 18, 2013
ATLANTA– An unsupervised contractor cut off communications to the FAA Atlantic Operations Control Center (AOCC) for 40 minutes Wednesday morning after dropping a cabinet door on a piece of equipment that routes voice communications to the facility.
The AOCC is responsible for coordinating air traffic control equipment restoration and providing equipment status information to air traffic control facilities in one-third of the country. During the incident, the AOCC was unable to receive or send any communications for 20 minutes before all of its operations were transferred to the Midstates Operations Control Center (MOCC) in Olathe, Kansas.
Mike Perrone, vice president of Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS) the union that represents FAA technicians, said that although communications were cut at the AOCC, the accident actually occurred in the Atlanta ARTCC and could just have easily impacted air traffic in the Atlanta area.
“The accident happened during a peak travel time so the contractor was just lucky that it didn’t impact the air traffic,” Perrone said. “Unfortunately, contractors can’t be that lucky all of the time.”
Perrone explained that because FAA technicians are responsible for operation and maintenance of the entire National Airspace System (NAS), they are acutely aware of the impact anything they do can have on the intricate system.
“The first thing an FAA technician does before performing any work on equipment is consider the risks and what the impact would be,” Perrone said. “Contractors, on the other hand, are not held to the same level of responsibility and often fail to take steps to mitigate the risks.”
“The professionalism of the technicians at the AOCC and in the field keeps the NAS safe and reliable,” Perrone concluded, “This is just one more example of why federal employees should be responsible for the NAS and not private contractors.”
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PASS represents more than 11,000 employees of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense who install, maintain, support and certify air traffic control and national defense equipment, inspect and oversee the commercial and general aviation industries, develop flight procedures and perform quality analyses of the aviation systems. For more information, visit the PASS website at www.passnational.org.