The comprehensive FAA reauthorization bill aims to bolster aviation safety in Alaska with provisions addressing weather and ADS-B coverage in the state. If passed into law, these provisions could see the state finally receiving the increase in certified weather-reporting equipment that pilots and commercial operators have been requesting for years.
Section 510 of the House bill addresses recommendations made in the 2021 FAA Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative (FAASI) concerning the installation of automated weather observation systems (AWOS) at airports throughout Alaska. It requires that the FAA will install—“to the greatest extent practicable”—AWOS equipment at applicable airports by Dec. 31, 2030. Airports with existing instrument approaches will receive priority selection.
It also makes the FAA responsible for ensuring the reliability of the equipment and asserts that the agency must act to repair systems that are unable to broadcast due to any failure, including those related to telecommunications.
The FAA will not be able to include systems that are unreliably broadcasting or broken when calculating operational status. This is a marked change from the current situation, as discussed by various stakeholders in the FAASI who decried the FAA habit of classifying routinely failed equipment as working.
The lack of certified weather reporting has been an ongoing problem in Alaska and a particular source of frustration in areas where IFR approaches exist but cannot be used. Without certified weather, Part 135 operators can be encouraged, for a myriad of reasons, to “go take a look,” causing pilots to determine in the air whether a VFR flight can be accomplished under marginal weather conditions.
The 2020 multiple-fatality accident involving Yute Commuter Services is an example of this sort of decision-making and continues a long tradition of accidents due to VFR into IMC (or continued flight into adverse conditions) in Alaska.
A survey conducted by AIN of the state’s Part 135-involved fatal and serious accidents between 1990 and May 2023 found 155 fatalities and 66 serious injuries due to such probable causes. (A total of 376 fatalities and 231 serious injuries for Part 135s occurred in that period.)
The bill mandates that the FAA will deploy visual weather observation systems in Alaska within one year of the act’s passage and ensure that such equipment meets the requirements to permit IFR operations at an airfield. It also calls for the considered placement of more weather cameras. No new cameras have been installed in Alaska since 2016 despite repeated calls for them, especially in the Southeast region, where seasonal lodge traffic relying on floatplanes and off-airport transportation can be heavy. (When asked by AIN earlier this year about camera expansion in Alaska, the FAA responded that there were no immediate plans for new sites.)
December 2030 ADS-B Mandate
ADS-B coverage also was addressed in the bill with a mandate that, no later than Dec. 31, 2030, the FAA will ensure that broadcast coverage is available at 5,000 feet. There was no mention of air traffic control radar coverage, which is similarly unavailable in many so-called “blackout” areas across the state. Stakeholders who contributed to the FAASI noted a lack of ATC radar coverage and communication in their comments to that document, but the topic was not addressed by the subcommittee.
The Senate bill has no mention of weather cameras or AWOS equipment at all other than to require the implementation of “reasonable alternative mitigations to improve maintenance” of FAA weather systems that suffer frequent outages. It references ADS-B for Alaska only by asserting that positive cost-benefit analysis requirements be waived when providing “a minimum operational network” in the state for “major flight routes.”
While Alaskans will likely be heartened by the state’s inclusion in the House bill, it should be noted that there was a potentially significant mention of Alaska in the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act but the law’s impact was disappointing to operators. In the act, as a workaround for the state’s aviation weather reporting issues, Part 135 operators were offered the opportunity to request an exemption to certified weather rules so that existing IFR approaches could be used regardless of onsite AWOS equipment.
Several companies pursued the exemption but, as documented in communications obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, there was a lot of confusion within the FAA over the legal interpretation of the law, and only one company, Hageland Aviation Services, utilized any aspect of the section. (As a sign of how complicated the process became, Hageland was not actually offered an exemption but rather was granted approval from its principal operations inspector in 2019, after which the FAA continued for months to argue over that approval.)
Less than a year after its CEO, Dave Pfleiger, discussed Section 322 at the September 2019 NTSB roundtable in Anchorage, Hageland shut down as part of the $90 million Ravn Air Group bankruptcy. Meanwhile, other Part 135 operators were forced to continue operating VFR-only into certain IFR-equipped airports because of the certified weather deficit. That situation is still the rule in large areas of rural Alaska.
According to the House bill, Congress has set fatal accident reduction goals for Alaska of 90 percent from 2019 to 2033, with no fatal accidents by Jan. 1, 2033, for Part 135 operators. Since 2013 there have been 37 fatal accidents involving Part 135s in the state, resulting in 104 deaths, most recently with the crash of Vertigo Air Taxi on July 2 near Old Harbor. While there have been several causes for these devastating crashes, the most common was VFR into IMC or continued flight into adverse conditions.