Sequestration

A new update from my ATC manager. She said the budget cutters are under extreme pressure about closing the CWO's. The original 14 will close on May 1st, and the other closings put on hold till they can sort things out. However, she again said they were told to be ready to take over OBS once the final decision is made. I guess we will find out next week if the closings will be staggered like prior post have said. As my previous post stated, some CWO's have been notified and my soon to be new contractor said most or all CWO's gone by Sept. 30th.

we heard after a telecom our ATC manager had that we will NOT be affected by any CWO closings. We are an A site.

Money over safety, money always wins out!!!!!!

At least twice in the last 36 hours our A-site has had to back up wind, visibility, and sky condition just moments before metar transmission. Everything was fine just a few minutes before, and about 30 minutes afterwards, but without quick intervention on our part, those two metars would not have had complete weather data. I suppose tower personel could have scrambled to provide back up data on time, or else sent a correction shortly afterwards, but unless the weather is good and flight operations are slow, I wouldn't want them having to prioritize between the planes in the air and the weather data needed to keep them safe. It doesn't happen frequently, but there are entire days, several times a year, when we must back up everything due to some sort of electrical or communication break down at the ASOS unit itself. Often we can input the data directly into our OID so that ASOS can transmit the Metars and Specials as it normally would, but sometimes it becomes necessary to call them in, which again would be more time spent having to prioritize between air traffic and weather data. When weather is good and flight operations are slow, I would be the first to admit that the tower is perfectly capable of performing our responsibilities in conjuction with theirs, but this is frequently not the case and I would sure hope that the bean-counters at the FAA are at least putting some consideration into how best to prioritize these responsibilities should the CWO program be eliminated.

We did manual obervations last year for an entire weekend. The ASOS went completely down and they weren't able to get it up and running again until Monday.

Guys, calm down. The FAA is looking at options and obviously they are looking at all possibilities, however, the possibility of the CWO being shut down would be an extreme decision. Even if the FAA makes this decision it is unlikely congress would not require the FAA to find a less extreme solution. Be cool!

Quoting from: www.contracttower.org/ctanews/aug2012.pdf

"I decided to take a closer look at the specific impact this sequestration process will have on the Federal Aviation Administration, a subject I have written about in the past. That agency, which is responsible for the safety and efficiency of all aspects of civil aviation in the United States, has a $15 billion annual budget distributed among a range of activities. It provides nearly a fourth of those funds as grants-in-aid to local airports. That might be a place where the largest share of the cut could be taken, but the sequestration law won’t allow it. Nor will it allow a disproportionate whack to be taken at facilities and equipment, which accounts for another fifth of the agency’s budget. The required 9 percent to 10 percent cut in Federal Aviation Administration spending, about $1.35 billion, must be taken equally from all activities, and that includes operations—in other words, the control towers. Even within the agency’s operations account there is little flexibility. Some airports, mostly smaller ones, are operated under contract, which means the control towers are run by employees of a private contractor and not by Federal Aviation Administration controllers. But since the money that supports those contracted services are discussed separately in the Appropriations Committee reports that fund the agency, they are, under the terms of the sequestration law, a separate activity and must be cut by no more or no less than the funding provided for agency-operated control towers..." (pages 13 & 14 of the .pdf)

Now, I also came across this: events.aaae.org/sites/090708/assets/images/0708_2FCT%20Program%20Office%20Update%207-28-09.pdf

Granted the numbers there are for fiscal year 2009, but if slide number 4 is to be believed, the entire CWO program only costs about $50 million a year to operate. The sequestration impacts discussed in the first link offers a possible explanation, but for the life of me I can not fathom how our government can not fund an annual budget of $50 million to keep our skies and climatological records safe. We spend a whole heck of a lot more every year on countries that don't like us, waging wars that others are not willing to fight or fund, re-building them after the fact, and so on. But setting aside whatever military and foreign aid spending, there is a lot of money wasted domestically as well. Surely the meager budget of the Contract Weather Program should survive this self-inflicted crisis, or else our government is even more incompetent than any of us have dared imagine thus far.