Don't Believe Agency's Hype, Unions Say

On Wednesday, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union partnered with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association in saying despite a rosy picture painted Tuesday by the FAA, the agency's upgraded Telecommunications Infrastructure network (FTI) is unreliable, lacks suitable backups, and continues to be a source of "great frustration and deep concern" for FAA technicians and air traffic controllers who must deal with it.

Both unions criticizes what they call the FAA’s decision to cut corners and costs on this project and run it on the razor’s edge despite a lengthy list of failures and outages.

PASS and NATCA complain the program, which is provided by Harris Corporation, suffers from insufficient training of contractors, poor planning and management, substandard service, and no backup for outages.

"The FAA is intent on declaring FTI a success even if it means ignoring significant issues with the program around the country,” said Mike Perrone, PASS vice president. “FTI is plagued by issues including unreliable service, contractor errors causing outages and lengthy response times by contractors and subcontractors.” Perrone cited serious outages over the past year in Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Austin, Buffalo, Little Rock, Birmingham and Memphis, “just to name a few

On Monday, PASS highlighted a case in Augusta, GA where it took over eight hours for a contractor from Harris to respond to an outage.

PASS is calling for the FAA to immediately re-engage its bargaining unit, and include NATCA, which it says has had no involvement in FTI to date.

FMI: www.passnational.org, www.natca.org