AFSS5602 Junior Member

When the FAA controlled flight service specialists were responsible for knowing an area with a 400 mile radius from their facility. This allowed specialists to become very familiar on airports, nav-aids, airways, and most importantly the terrain and weather for that area.

Today Lockheed expects specialists to be familiar with an entire 1/3 of the United States and take calls in 2/3 of the United States. To become an expert on that large of an area takes many many years. This has not only caused a decrease in knowledge available but safety is being compromised as happened last week.

Last week a pilot called up for a clearance from Sidney, Nebraska in the central service region. Lockheed's call tree rolled the call to a Montana Flight Data specialist in the Western Service Region. Montana also has a Sidney airport. You can probably see where this is going... The specialist called ATC in Montana for the clearance. They said they didn't have a flight plan so the specialist filed one and relayed the clearance to the pilot. The pilot took off of Sidney, Nebraska right into oncoming traffic that was cleared for an approach. ATC had to take extremely quick action to avoid a collision.

Specialists are not happy about calls rolling over to other areas, especially other service areas, because stuff like what mentioned above can happen. The company refuses to fix things however and when specialists transfer calls back to the appropriate area they are often chewed out by management and threatened by Lockheed's QA people.