On the whims of climate reporting: How village journey is affected when essential FAA gear goes down

Rural Alaskans know the drill. Bad climate can floor flights and intrude with one’s journey plans. Or, if it’s not the climate, flights might get grounded when the FAA’s climate reporting system doesn’t work and industrial plane can’t fly between communities. That’s greater than an inconvenience for over 80 p.c of Alaskans who reside in communities solely accessible by plane.
Recently, Shishmaref’s FAA Automated Weather Observation System skilled such an outage and was not reporting the climate for days on finish, leaving the group with out industrial air service. Nobody may journey in or out of Shishmaref, no mail, no groceries, no remedy might be transported to the group.
The faculty’s Assistant Principal Maggie Gray was caught in Nome en route dwelling from a convention, others had been not in a position to go dwelling for longer. Curtis Nayokpuk Jr. and three of his mates had been decided to attend the AFN basketball match and determined to make use of an adventurous route by boating from Shishmaref to Teller, driving to Nome they usually certainly made it in time to the match in Anchorage.
Having lived within the Bering Strait School District area for 9 years, the Assistant Principal Gray stated she understands unhealthy climate holds, however a misfunctioning piece of climate reporting gear? “I was like, well, there’s got to be something that we can do.” So she drafted some emails, and despatched them out to the FAA, to the senators of Alaska, “basically, anybody that I thought could get some results,” she stated. The first response from the FAA emails was mainly that they weren’t within the workplace because of the lapse in funding, she stated. Her response was: that’s completely simply not okay. “So I started with Alaska’s Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan,” she stated. She additionally wrote to state Senator Donny Olson. And posted a plea for assistance on social media. “I was honestly quite shocked to get the feedback,” she stated.
Senator Olson’s workplace helped and some days later, the half vital to repair the FAA system arrived in Shishmaref, she picked it up from the airport when throughout a stretch of excellent climate planes may fly and he or she was instructed a technician would quickly comply with.
As of now, the AWOS remains to be not one hundred pc reporting however it at the very least allowed Bering Air to renew some flights and catching up with passengers, mail and items. 
 The problem isn’t remoted to the Bering Strait area, neither is it a brief incidence. Will Day, govt director with the Alaska Air Carriers Association, stated Alaska’s climate infrastructure pertaining to aviation is “an ongoing and chronic issue, particularly the reliability with outages and failures and maintenance related issues that stems predominantly from the remote nature of a lot of these weather stations.”
 

Photo by Jenni Monet
PLAYING AT ALL COSTS— Shishmaref’s Curtis Nayokpuk Jr., left, was decided to journey to the AFN Basketball match in Anchorage regardless of the AWOS outage induced airplane service interruption. He and three others determined to make the lengthy journey from Anchorage by boat to Teller, by street to Nome and by airplane to Anchorage.

So, how does AWOS work?
Bering Air President Russell Rowe, Director of Operations Fen Kinneen and Chief Pilot Nathaniel Olson in an interview with the Nome Nugget defined how FAA AWOS outages have an effect on their operations. First, it’s an advanced system. 
Fen Kinneen defined that the Federal Aviation Administration’s Automated Weather Observation System, or AWOS for brief, is an FAA-owned and maintained piece of kit that has been round for a very long time. “It’s an older piece of equipment run on Windows XP, if that gives you a sense of the age of it,” Kinneen stated. “The instrument monitors a number of weather parameters, some of which are required for us to fly in instrument conditions, meaning solely by reference to the instruments in the aircraft.” Those are referred to as instrument flight guidelines. When the climate is obvious, pilots can fly beneath visible flight guidelines. “So sometimes when we have these outages, it’s not really known to the public, because we can fly under a different set of rules when it’s nice and sunny out,” stated Kinneen. 
Day, with the Air Carriers Association, defined that there’s the FAA’s AWOS and likewise ASOS, which is automated floor commentary methods, owned by the National Weather Service. “Those two types of systems are placed across the state and sort of a comprehensive network to provide as much weather data as possible,” he stated. “In aviation, when all of those stations function properly, it allows for two different types of air travel. So there’s what’s called visual flight rules, and then instrument flight rules. Visual flight rules means that you can fly anywhere you can see. Of course, it’s more complex, but that’s the concept. And then instrument flight rules means that you can fly where you cannot see specific paths that are charted through the sky. And so if you want to operate as a commercial air carrier in Alaska reliably, the best method to do so is to fly IFR and VFR, because it opens many opportunities for you to get to and from your point of departure to your destination,” Day stated.
If AWOS or ASOS will not be reporting in a means that dispatchers and pilots are in a position to entry that data, then these plane going IFR can not entry these areas.
 Bering Air’s Russell Rowe added that every method is totally different for each village, and there are totally different minimal climate necessities for altitude and visibility. “So we don’t dispatch the flight out of Nome to those destinations unless it’s above those minimums for the approach,” he stated. 
The AWOS system comes into play when pilots don’t fly beneath visible flight guidelines. Rowe defined that the AWOS methods ship the official climate that Bering Air is taking a look at to make that call whether or not to go or to not go. “So if the AWOS is reporting something lower than the approach allows you to go down to then there’s no point in going there,” Rowe stated. If the AWOS isn’t reporting in any respect and there’s purpose to consider that there’s cloud protection, obscuring mountains between Nome and the vacation spot, the planes don’t fly. Without the climate data on the vacation spot, the planes wouldn’t be cleared to land. 
 
How is AWOS data made out there?
Lately, it was Shishmaref’s FAA AWOS that had issues, however regionwide, the AWOS reporting isn’t constant. After the FAA may despatched out a technician to repair the AWOS, it failed once more to report. But it was simply the web portion that failed. The data remains to be out there by phone and might be listened to on VHF radio. 
Accessing the official climate reporting from the AWOS system is vital to make the choices whether or not to fly or to not fly beneath the instrument flight guidelines. But the reliability is questionable. “We have some that are really reliable and work all the time,” added Kinneen. “And then there’s some that seem to have more problems than others, and it seems to actually rotate. I can’t really give a rhyme or reason to how it’s when the failures or why the failures are occurring.”
 
What might be carried out?
Kinneen stated that over the previous few years, the outages have change into a high-visibility matter. This has spurred motion on the regulatory and  legislative facet.
As Alaska faces an aviation accident fee greater than double the nationwide common, the FAA and the federal DOT have begun to determine options. The federal Department of Transportation introduced just lately to construct a state-of-the-art air site visitors management system to reinforce security within the sky, scale back delays, and supply air site visitors controllers with fashionable, dependable gear. This overhaul contains the addition of 174 new climate stations for the state and a modernization of flight service methods. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 licensed $25 million yearly for FAA Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative from FY 2025 by way of 2028. According to Senator Dan Sullivan’s workplace, the FAA additionally introduced it will likely be increasing the FAA’s use of satellites in Alaska—rising from 4 testing websites to 16—to assist help connectivity at climate monitoring websites, significantly within the extra distant components of the state. 
“Alaska has long had issues with reliable weather information for the aviation community. The 2024 reauthorization, of which Senator Sullivan was an author, required the FAA to fix telecommunications connections to address those needs,” a press launch from Sullivan reads. However, these enhancements have but to manifest. After a yearlong examination of questions of safety particular to Alaska, the FAA made a listing of suggestions, topped by the necessity to enhance and enhance climate information reporting and forecasting. The advice learn: Install Automated Weather Observing Systems at airports that don’t have them and the place the methods would have the largest security profit and proceed testing a brand new expertise referred to as Visual Weather Observation System, or VWOS.
 
In the meantime, the Alaska Air Carriers Association is collaborating in a joint industry-government initiative referred to as the Alaska’s climate working group. It is a mixture of the state of Alaska DOT, Alaska Region FAA and the overall aviation {industry}. The group, says Will Day of the AACA, meets regularly and focus on which stations have to be prioritized, to be repaired and stuck, and the place new stations are wanted.
Day stated that in 2024 Senator Murkowski organized a gathering of stakeholders in Yakutat to speak concerning the significance of the continued climate reporting problem. “She basically got everybody into the room to start brainstorming what could be done, which led to the creation of that weather working group,” Day stated.
Day stated federal funds have been made out there by way of the Don Young Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative, which is previously referred to as the FAA Alaska Safety Initiative, or FAASI, and provisions within the One Big Beautiful Bill. 
While actual greenback quantities are unknown but, Day stated that the working group is making a activity record prioritizing climate stations restore or replacements. 
As for upgrading expertise, he stated, “We’re exploring the possibility of using what’s called a VWOS, which is a visual weather observation system, and it’s significantly cheaper and as I understand, a higher technology than an AWOS or an ASOS.” He stated the AWOS value someplace within the neighborhood of $2 million per unit, whereas VWOS prices someplace round $200,000. 
 
How to encourage change?
Day stated people can have an effect on change by reporting issues with the methods and the way it impacts one’s life. “Those stories are the most powerful things, in my opinion, for change,” Day stated. “When you have somebody who relies on reliable air service for critical medication and doesn’t receive that medication and then suffers a consequence, potentially a life threatening consequence, those stories make impacts. And they make people want to change things. So the more you can push that information to us, to the delegation, to anybody who will listen, the more power we have to make those changes.” 
Back to Shishmaref. When planes may fly once more beneath visible flight guidelines, the assistant principal Maggie Gray who has emailed to state and federal management to attract consideration to the AWOS state of affairs, occurred to be on the Shishmaref airstrip to select up an individual when the substitute half for the AWOS system got here in. As is her routine, she helped unload the airplane and the agent pointed to a field saying, “This is fragile, it’s the part that keeps us coming here.”
“And I said, Are you saying that’s the part? And he’s like, ‘Yeah, this is it,’” she stated. “I unloaded it off the plane, and I went, grabbed my phone real quick. I said, I got to take a selfie with this because it was just, it was just cool.”

With reporting by Jenni Monet.