Wed, Nov 05, 2003
Fried Feds Working Hard To Compensate For VOR Lost In
Wildfires
When the Southern California Consolidated Terminal Radar Control
(SoCal Tracon) was forced to shut down a week and a half ago by
wildfires raging dangerously close by, it caused massive but
relatively short-term disruptions. Now the FAA is dealing with
potentially much longer term disruptions caused when a heavily used
radio navigation aid burned to the ground in one of the fires.
Fillmore VOR (FIM), located northwest of the Los Angeles basin,
is the primary navaid for traffic from northern California and the
Pacific Northwest heading into southern California.
It defines portions of two high-altitude jet airways and seven
low-altitude Victor airways. The loss of FIM affects nine departure
procedures at six airports, 10 standard arrival routes (STARs) at
six airports, and 30 approach procedures at eight airports.
The FAA says the area has good radar and radio coverage, so
controllers are vectoring air traffic along the route to compensate
for the loss of FIM. There are no RNAV (GPS) STARs either in
existence or planned that could be used to replace Fillmore VOR,
and because of terrain and coverage issues, no other existing VOR
signals could be used to compensate.
Longer term, the agency is trying to decide if it will put a
mobile temporary VOR in Fillmore's place or rebuild the facility
from the ground up. Not replacing the facility would
require redesigning and flight-checking every affected
procedure.
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