Company executives met in August with AOPA staff to review progress and AOPA members' concerns about the service they're receiving.
According to Lockheed Martin, briefers are answering calls in less than 30 seconds on average. That's better than the FAA's average when it ran the automated flight service station system (AFSS), and Lockheed Martin is doing it with 500 fewer employees.
Some members have reported being on hold longer than 30 seconds or being transferred to other facilities where the specialists aren't as knowledgeable about local conditions.
Company officials acknowledge that some stations are not fully staffed, particularly those destined for closure as part of the modernization program, and that can lead to longer hold times or to the call being transferred to a specialist in another facility.
But Lockheed Martin is working to resolve that problem. The company is continuing to train and certify briefers on specific flight planning areas, and is recruiting pilots in hard-to-staff cities to train them as FSS specialists. Ultimately, you should always talk to a briefer who has knowledge of your local area.
Promote safety with aviation-themed holiday cards
Share your love of aviation by sending an AOPA Air Safety Foundation aviation-themed holiday card. It's an easy way to help make general aviation safer. That's because a portion of the proceeds from the holiday cards helps ASF to provide safety education courses free to thousands of pilots.
The cards range from "American Holiday Sunrise," an elegant gold-embossed card with cardinals perched on logs in the foreground and a vintage biplane flying in the sunrise over a log cabin in the background, to "Moonlight Snowmen," a simple drawing of two snowmen watching a biplane fly in the moonlight on a snowy winter's night.
Prices range from $24 to $29 for a box of 25 cards. Each order includes a set of 25 personalized return-address labels and decorative envelope seals. For more information, or to place an order, visit ASF's Holiday Card Center.
Airspace explained, online
If you're looking for a quick way to learn about today's complex airspace, visit the Airspace Safety Hot Spot on the AOPA Air Safety Foundation's Web site, which contains a collection of the best airspace education materials on a single page.
Each Safety Hot Spot offers a host of resources, including free interactive online courses and quizzes, AOPA and ASF publications, links to related Web sites, and more.
You can also read up on airspace on Flight Training Online. The Web site includes articles from AOPA Flight Training that discuss the different types of airspace, airspace restrictions, and more.
AOPA's Real-Time Flight Planner gets upgrade
AOPA Flight Training members can download the latest version of AOPA's Real-Time Flight Planner, which made its debut in August. New enhancements include graphical overlays of airmets and sigmets, wind speed/direction and temperature at altitude on the FlightLog, and pop-up windows showing METARs along a route. For student pilots still learning the art of planning a flight, the RTFP can be used to validate your calculations.
See AOPA Online for a complete description of the enhancements and instructions for downloading the powerful new version. All of your stored pilot and aircraft profiles and routes are maintained when you install the new version.
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