Korona - Flyplass går fra kontrollert til ukontrollert i USA - Curt Lewis

 

Ill.: ICAO

Airliners are on their own with no air traffic control at a Florida airport for 12 days after FAA staff contracted COVID-19

The air traffic control tower at St Pete-Clearwater International Airport in St Petersburg, Florida is closed until January 31.

The FAA closed the facility for cleaning after personnel tested positive for COVID-19.

Allegiant Air is the main carrier at the airport that also sees high general aviation and private jet traffic.

The phrases "cleared to land" or "cleared for takeoff" won't be heard at St Pete-Clearwater International Airport until January 31 as the airport's control tower was closed earlier this month, even as planes continue to use the Florida airport.

The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily shuttered the facility for cleaning after an air traffic controller tested positive for COVID-19 on January 20. Pilots now have to navigate the "uncontrolled" airport entirely on their own for the time being.

These closures have become common during the pandemic but have rarely lasted for 12 days, as is the case in St Petersburg. Most cleanings take a few hours, if that, with the FAA saying they've gotten the protocol down pat to minimize disruptions.

"During the past few months, we have greatly reduced the amount of time facilities remain closed for COVID-19-related cleaning - from six to eight hours down to as little as one to one-and-a-half hours," the FAA told Insider in a statement. "We generally schedule COVID-19 cleanings for the overnight hours."

But "staff exposure" is forcing the facility to stay closed for longer than normal.

Ultra-low-cost carrier Allegiant Air is the primary airline at the airport serving destinations as far as Plattsburgh, New York; Bangor, Maine; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. As many as 42 daily flights operated by the airline are scheduled to depart and arrive in St Petersburg during the week of the tower closure.

The Airbus A320 family aircraft utilized by Allegiant will now have to contend with general aviation without the help of air traffic control when departing from and arriving at the airport. Air traffic controllers at nearby Tampa International Airport will help coordinate aircraft under a "one in, one out" policy.

But for taxi, takeoff, and landing, pilots will have to brush up on their uncontrolled airport communication skills.

Back to basics

Pilots are trained on how to operate into uncontrolled airports during primary flight training so for most, it's nothing that they haven't dealt with before. Aircraft talk to each other on a dedicated frequency for that airport and just have to be extra cautious by announcing their location multiple times as they approach and depart the airport, as well as constantly be on the lookout for other planes operating in the area.

Uncontrolled airports aren't uncommon as not all of the country's greater than 5,000 public airports feature a fully staffed FAA facility. But for airline pilots, it's not something they experience every day on the job, especially at an airport as busy as St Pete-Clearwater International where airliners co-exist with private jets and other general aviation aircraft.

The pandemic, however, has forced all pilots to become reacquainted with these skills as it's standard procedure by the FAA to close facilities for cleaning after personnel test positive for COVID-19, and it's wreaked havoc on the national airspace system at times. A positive case detected at one facility can affect hundreds of flights, as was the case in December when the Fort Worth Air Route Control Center closed for cleaning in the middle of the day.

All flights departing from airports under the facility's airspace, including Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field Airport, were halted. And aircraft that were just passing through the airspace were forced to reroute around it or hold at their departure airports until the airspace was reopened.

St Pete-Clearwater International is also far from the largest airport to have this issue as Chicago's Midway International, Las Vegas' McCarran International, and Orange County, California's John Wayne Airport have all had to close their air traffic control towers for cleaning, leaving the airports temporarily uncontrolled at times.

New York's John F. Kennedy International experienced a similar issue in March 2020 but controllers were able to utilize a backup facility while the main control tower was closed.

Vaccine Rollout Misses TSA Screeners, Air-Traffic Controllers

By Alan Levin

• Essential federal workers left to local governments for shot
•  Acting head of homeland security names task force to remedy

They’re essential workers performing critical safety work and have been assigned priority designation to receive the coronavirus vaccine.

Yet tens of thousands of airport security screeners, air-traffic controllers and federal accident investigators who must report to work in spite of the virus ravaging the U.S. haven’t gotten the shot and aren’t sure how and when they will.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Jennifer Homendy, one of five members of the National Transportation Safety Board. “The vaccine rollout from my point of view has been mismanaged.”

The problem, according to multiple officials, is that the shots are being delivered by scores of state and local health agencies, which are using varying standards for who should be given priority. In some cases, employees have been told they qualify for the vaccine, only to be directed back to their employer after saying they work for the federal government, Homendy said.

Nowhere has the impact been more severe than among the roughly 50,000 TSA Transportation Screening Officers. So far in the pandemic, more than 6,100 TSA employees, most of them airport screeners, have contracted coronavirus and 14 have died, according to TSA.

Hydrick Thomas, president of the American Federation of Government Employees TSA Council 100 union, said he has fielded repeated complaints from his members about the lack of access.

“TSA has been pushed to the back of the line for some reason,” Thomas said. “We are protecting the country. When it comes down to protecting the employees, they are very lackadaisical.”

About 14,000 air-traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration have also been required to work in the close confines of airport towers and windowless control centers across the country. So far, more than 900 at 313 facilities have contracted coronavirus, according to the agency.

The acting secretary of Homeland Security on Monday, reacting to concerns from its workforce over lack of access to the vaccine, established a task force called Operation Vaccinate our Workforce, according to a letter obtained by Bloomberg News.

“In keeping with the intent behind Operation VOW, my vow to you is that I will have no higher priority than your health and safety,” wrote David Pekoske, who was temporarily elevated to head DHS from his post as chief of the Transportation Security Administration.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has helped establish priority lists for those being vaccinated, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In one of his first actions, Biden on Jan. 20 signed an executive order requiring creation of a task force to study how to prioritize and distribute the vaccine to federal workers. Since Dec. 14, more than 23 million shots have been given in the U.S. and the rate has climbed to an average of 1.25 million in the past week.

Some federal agencies, such as the State Department, received their own allotments of vaccine. But many large agencies with essential workers, including DHS and the Transportation Department, haven’t. That has essentially left their workers to fend for themselves.

“States have been given prioritization recommendations, but they are making their own operational decisions,” said Kelly Moore, a doctor who is deputy director of the Immunization Action Coalition, which promotes vaccine education.

Thousands of FAA employees who conduct safety inspections, maintain critical equipment and travel to plane crashes have been waiting to find out when they can be vaccinated. Their union, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, has asked the agency for “a different approach or strategy,” it said in a statement.

“At this point, states are determining which of their residents receive vaccination priorities,” the FAA said in a statement.

Local Agencies

The NTSB has only a few hundred workers but they are spread out around the country, meaning about 70 different local government agencies are responsible for administering the shots to its employees, many with different policies, Homendy said.

The agency is contacting each one of the 70 jurisdictions in an attempt to speed up the process, Homendy said.

NTSB’s accident investigators aren’t trying to take priority from other critical workers and there’s no move to get political appointees or those who work from the office immunized, Homendy said.

While the NTSB has mostly been keeping its investigators at home during the pandemic, it sent a team to Indonesia earlier this month to participate in a probe of a Jan. 9 crash of an airliner.

“If something big happened tomorrow, we’d be there,” Homendy said. “But that’s a risk to our workers and potentially others.”