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BANGOR – The Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to outsource the operation of its flight services stations will leave nearly 30 federal employees at Bangor International Airport out of work this fall.
Employees at Bangor’s station were notified one week ago that they will be laid off effective Oct. 4, and the station will shut down entirely by next spring.
The flight station staff is angry and worried, not only because they’re losing their jobs, but also because they think air travel safety will be compromised.
“They issued our walking papers,” Bill Moriarty, operations manager at the station, said Thursday. “We’re gone October 4.”
Employees at the Bangor station argue that their personal knowledge of the area’s weather patterns and topography is crucial to safe air travel, and relying only on automated information will put pilots at risk.
“People are going to die,” Moriarty predicted. “That’s the cold, hard truth. Accidents are going to go up.”
The FAA in February announced its $1.9 billion five-year contract with Lockheed Martin to install new technology and upgrade facilities to improve efficiency of automated flight service stations, which provide support services such as weather updates, route planning and air space information.
The contract means the existing 58 flight service stations nationwide will be consolidated to 20, a move that is expected to save $2.2 billion over the next 10 years.
“We believe the system will be far more efficient and also will assure safe skies,” Lockheed spokesman Joe Wagovich said Thursday.
The Bangor station serves primarily general aviation, military and corporate pilots, though it also provides backup to the major airlines when their in-house systems are down.
BIA officials are taking a wait-and-see approach, hoping that Lockheed’s services will measure up, while keeping in mind that the FAA has said the changeover will have minimal impact on airport operations.
“We will be watching closely to see if Lockheed Martin can deliver everything they’ve promised,” Airport Director Rebecca Hupp said Thursday.
The employees were under the impression that Lockheed Martin would provide them stable jobs at other locations, but the best offer they’ve had so far is a guaranteed three-year position at facilities as far away as Arizona, Moriarty said.
The employees blame the FAA for failing to protect its employees throughout the outsourcing process.
“It’s short of criminal what they’ve done to people,” Russ Eastman, an eight-year employee of Bangor’s flight services station, said Thursday. “I’m still in a state of almost not believing this is happening.”
Come the October deadline, Eastman will be 20 days short of reaping his full retirement benefits as a 20-year federal employee. His wife, also an air traffic controller at the station, has decided to move to Arizona with the couple’s 11-year old daughter in hopes of finding work with Lockheed Martin, Eastman said.
Of the 27 air traffic controllers and two administrators employed at the Bangor station, seven have been offered jobs with Lockheed Martin at planned flight services hubs in Leesburg, Va., Fort Worth, Texas, and Prescott, Ariz., Moriarty said.
Particularly frustrating was Lockheed’s decision to award jobs based on a first-come, first-served basis, rather than on the applicants’ skills and experience, he said.
“We were never told that it was a footrace to put our applications in,” Moriarty, a 14-year employee of the Bangor station, said. He will work for five months beyond the October date and will have to find other work when the station closes in the spring, he said.
The FAA has worked both with its employees and with Lockheed to find jobs for flight service station workers, Arlene Murray, an FAA spokeswoman, said Thursday. Efforts have been made to relocate employees to other positions within the FAA or other federal agencies, she said.
Of the roughly 2,300 employees nationwide affected by the consolidation, 96 percent have accepted offers at either the three planned flight services hubs or elsewhere at Lockheed Martin, company spokesman Wagovich said Thursday.
“We believe that they’ll find the work rewarding,” he said.
Only 350 of those jobs are at the flight service hubs, where air traffic controllers can continue doing the jobs they are trained to do, Moriarty said. Many will be forced to find other work, leaving $70,000 annual salaries and federal retirement plans, he said.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” air traffic controller Craig Beaulieu said Thursday between calls, cradling a phone on his shoulder while providing weather information to pilots.
Moriarty estimates that the closure will cost the local economy up to $15 million; $5 million in direct payroll, plus money spent locally for goods and services provided to the station, such as repair work on computers.
Nothing can replace the employees’ experience and knowledge of the area’s weather and terrain, Moriarty said. He used as an example the search and rescue effort initiated by the station last August when Kathy Hodgkins of Glenburn crashed her small plane into the side of Big Houston Mountain.
Though Hodgkins was killed in the crash, station employees’ working relationships with the Maine Forest Service and Maine Warden Service allowed them to quickly coordinate rescue operations, Moriarty said.
“We had people in the air within one hour looking for her,” he said.
In more day-to-day operations, the flight service station workers are uniquely qualified to tell pilots whether the fog blanketing Bar Harbor in the summer will burn off by 10 a.m., or if New Hampshire’s Mount Washington will be visible when scattered clouds are predicted, Moriarty said.
Beyond providing weather services, the station’s duties also include disseminating updates on runway conditions and aeronautical information, as well as assisting with flight planning, he said.
“The pilots won’t have anybody that knows Maine and New Hampshire, eastern Canada, quite like we did,” Moriarty said.
Bangor’s flight service station
. Services provided: weather updates, flight planning assistance and air space information to inbound and outbound pilots
. Primary users: general aviation, corporate and military pilots
. Area served: Maine and New Hampshire
. Average workload: 600 calls per day in spring and summer months, 300 during the fall and winter
. Employees: 29
. Planned closure: Spring 2006
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