POWER OUTAGE AT BOSTON CONSOLIDATED TRACON RAISES MAJOR CONCERNS
- Details
- Published: July 18, 2013
Draws Attention to Staffing Issues and Management Responsibility
WASHINGTON, DC - Last week, radar screens went blank and radio communications were briefly lost as routine maintenance was performed at Boston Consolidated TRACON (BCT). The outage resulted in numerous delays and cancellations and has raised serious concerns among the Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS), the union that represents Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) technicians.
Technicians were performing a routine maintenance procedure when a single power relay failed and caused interruptions to three power panels that supply the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System (STARS), radio communications and legal recordings of air traffic control transmissions. This single point of failure is problematic to technicians. “The FAA should have redundancy in its relay power panels to critical air traffic equipment in order to safeguard against these types of occurrences,” said Mike Perrone, vice president of PASS.
The outage has brought to light serious problems with technician staffing levels and management priorities within BCT. “This facility operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is one of the busiest in the nation yet; there was only one technician on duty to monitor and maintain all the systems affected by the power outage,” said Perrone. Several environmental technicians were called in to respond to the outage. “Luckily, technicians were able to quickly and swiftly restore systems before any real harm could have been done,” said Perrone.
PASS is also concerned that FAA system managers, who are typically rewarded based on system availability, left significant details out of the daily outage report. “We have a situation where major details of this outage went unreported,” said Perrone. “Ultimately, if FAA managers are not accurately tracking this information, how will it be investigated or addressed? “It leads me to wonder, what else are they not reporting in order to secure bonuses?”
“It is mind-boggling that BCT, a brand new facility commissioned in March of 2004, is plagued with so many equipment issues yet the FAA still plans to transition to a ‘fix on fail’ approach to maintenance of critical aviation systems,” said Perrone. “The quick response of PASS technicians may have kept the public’s safety from being impacted this time, but what about next time? And there will be a next time.
###
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.