Early one September morning in 2003, Darryl Ayers, a flight-service specialist in Bangor, got a call from the brother of the owner of Twitchell’s Airport in Turner. A 1976 Cessna had just taken off from that field, heading northwest toward low clouds, a red flag for a plane flown by sight rather than instrumentation.

Mr. Ayers called around and soon discovered the owner of the plane hadn’t given anyone permission to fly it. Why did he call? “I just had a funny feeling about it,” he said recently. “It didn’t seem right.”

The plane was soon beyond Portland’s radar limit, and shortly after, Northeast Air Defense lost the plane in the hills, but Mr. Ayers continued to track its flight toward Canada. He didn’t know it at the time, but the person in the cockpit was Jason Begin, who was busy escaping from charges of unlawful sexual contact and gross sexual assault in Androscoggin County.

Mr. Ayers was able to track the plane, until it crossed into Canada, not because he had the latest high-tech equipment but because he had worked as a flight specialist in Bangor for 13 years. He called people along the likely path of the plane, asked them to watch for it and so was able to tell Canadian authorities where it entered their air space. Eventually, the plane ran out of gas and crashed in a Montreal field. Mr. Begin was later found mentally ill and did not stand trial.

Catching escapees isn’t technically part of Mr. Ayers’ job, but he and 34 colleagues at the Bangor Automated Flight Service Station don’t find it unusual. They normally do the sort of work you might expect. They brief Maine and New Hampshire’s pilots or visiting pilots, especially noncommercial pilots, on weather conditions and work with them on flight plans for trips as close as one air strip away or as far as the Middle East. They provide flight plans for the 101st Air Refueling Wing of the Maine Air National Guard and coordinate flights through NORAD Air Defense zones. They know how the fog breaks or doesn’t around Bar Harbor; they can tell pilots what the wind is going to be like Down East.

There is also search and rescue; if a plane is lost, the service is supposed to know where to look. There’s air-ambulance service support and bulletins warning when national security requires air-space restrictions. (President Bush’s plane gets a 30-mile bubble. You don’t want to go inside that bubble.) Finally, there is what attracts public attention, such as the escapee or the time a student pilot who had just taken off in Lebanon. N.H, was informed by Bill Moriarty, a supervisor at the Bangor station, that she had left her nose wheel on the runway.

It’s necessary, mostly unrecognized work – until something goes wrong – and in recounting his ability to track the stolen plane by calling people, Mr. Ayers makes a point that should be obvious: “You have to know these people before you can call.”

But this isn’t obvious to everyone. The flight service site in Bangor will soon be closed and most of its crew fired. As part of the president’s “competitive sourcing” agenda, some 30,000 government employees have had to compete for their jobs against private contractors and mostly the government employees have won. But not in the case of the flight-service stations, where Lockheed Martin underbid the employees and will take over the service starting in October. Lockheed will close 41 sites around the country, including Bangor, while consolidating services at hubs in Virginia, Texas and Arizona and at the remaining 17 sites. The local knowledge for Maine and New Hampshire pilots will then come from, say, Islip, N.Y. Good luck with that.

The curious thing, though, about the group the Federal Aviation Administration put up to competitive sourcing is that most of them were hired in the mid and late 1980s, not long after the air-traffic controllers’ strike. Ninety-two percent of those in the flight service are over age 40, meaning they will soon be eligible for their government retirements, which are due to them after 20 years of service. But many, because they will now lose their jobs sooner than that, in their 17th, 18th or 19th year, will also lose the pensions they were told they could count on. The FAA reports that its savings through competitive sourcing will be considerable.

Earlier this week a lawsuit was filed in Washington on behalf of these employees, alleging age discrimination, a suit that now stands a better chance given the Supreme Court decision on this issue. To be clear, there are some, mostly temporary, jobs at Lockheed Martin. But those government pensions would be gone.

Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have contacted the agency about the situation, but they’ve barely been acknowledged, according to Sen. Snowe’s office. That is probably to be expected. When a federal agency demands that its public employees compete, then declares, as the FAA did on its web site, it has allowed the service to fall into a state of “aging facilities and equipment,” an “imbalanced workload” and “inadequate funding,” being overseen by “retirement-eligible workforce” it is not likely to encourage a senator to look closely at the situation.

Consolidation doesn’t have to be a problem. The flight-service union itself once suggested a consolidation plan with a more regional approach, one that would preserve some measure of local knowledge. What is a problem is telling employees who have spent a fair part of their lives in government service and who are now reaching middle age that their pensions have gone – disappeared into the clouds without a trace.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.