The building that houses the Oakland Flight Service Station is nothing remarkable -- just a square concrete structure at the northern end of Oakland Airport's North Field. But it's surrounded by history. Old, clapboard buildings from World War II line the airport frontage road that leads to the station. And side streets still carry names like Sikorsky, Ryan and Grumman -- giants in an industry that has long since left some of those legendary manufacturers behind.
Well, at least the station will be in good company.
Much has already changed from the good old days. The door to the facility is securely locked. I press a buzzer by the door, and tell a disembodied voice that I'm here to get a pilot weather briefing. There's a loud click as the door unlocks. I smile. At least pilots are still welcome here.
I walk into a darkened, quiet room where the brightest spots are the computer monitors at various work stations. It looks like many other Flight Service Stations I've visited over the years -- although I'm old enough to also remember ones that had windows.
My arrival generates a bit of excitement among the briefers. Not too many pilots stop by the station for face-to-face briefings anymore. "I remember getting all of my briefings by walking in the door, in Hawaii," says a briefer named John, as we walk over to his station. "I loved having that face to face contact."
Unfortunately, this will very likely be the very last personal briefing I receive in my flying career, as well as the last personal briefing John ever gets to give. The Oakland Flight Service Station -- the fourth oldest station in the country, dating back to the air mail days of 1928 -- has been slated for closure at the beginning of February 2009 by Lockheed Martin, which won the contract to manage the nation's Flight Service Stations in 2005. Most of the staff is being reassigned to one of Lockheed's "hub" facilities in Prescott AZ; Ft. Worth TX; and Ashburn VA -- none of which is located near an airport or runway.
John takes me to his station where four high-resolution monitors are already organized and indexed to instantly call up, correlate and synthesize a wide variety of source material. We go over my flight route and weather systems approaching over the next few days. He looks at infrared and upper level wind charts to see how strong or weak the approaching systems promise to be. We look at military and civilian sites to assess fog and cloud cover. The system file-sorts TFRs and notams and highlights in red the ones along my flight route and time. We trade a couple of flying weather stories and discuss how phone weather briefings might be improved, from a pilot's point of view.
I file my flight plan with a more thorough understanding and confidence about what I'm about to face in my plane than usual. And I find myself wishing I could get every weather briefing this way. But time stops for no one. So I thank John and say good-bye -- not only to him, but to the Oakland FSS, and an era and element in aviation that I, for one, am sorely going to miss.
My first introduction to flight service briefers came right after my first introduction to an airplane. As part of one of my earliest flying lessons, my flight instructor took me in to the local Flight Service Station and very somberly introduced me to the people who worked there.
"These are very important people," he intoned. "You need to learn how to talk to them, ask them the right questions, and interpret and understand the information they give you. Because their job is to help keep you alive."
I nodded seriously, feeling like a young child being entrusted with the care of a new puppy, or an acolyte being initiated into an age-old brotherhood. I listened intently as the briefers explained the various charts and screens they used to give pilots information on the weather. Isobars, millibars, occluded fronts, high pressure, low- pressure systems, wind arrows, prog charts for 12 and 24 hours ... just learning the symbology was a challenge.
It was the mid-1980s, and my early flights were all to small-town airports around Indiana and Kentucky. And I soon learned that any airport that had a Flight Service Station on the field was a bonanza stop for a student pilot. One of the scariest parts of cross-country flying was not knowing what the conditions -- especially the wind conditions -- were going to be at my destination. And unicom frequencies at the small airports where I was flying weren't always monitored or answered.
But if there was a Flight Service Station on the field, I knew my calls would be answered -- and by someone who knew a lot about local conditions. Upon landing, I could walk into the FSS facility and get the briefing for my next flight leg in person. Not only did that give me a knowledgeable person go over the charts with me, but it also made me feel a little less alone in my efforts to find the best and safest route home.
Over the years, my appreciation of the community that helps us find our way home, or the assistance offered by a good flight service briefer, has never wavered. That's not to say every briefer is or has been helpful. All of us have run into individuals who didn't seem to have much vocabulary or flexibility of advice beyond "VFR flight is not recommended." I quickly learned to deal with these well-meaning folks by saying "thank you," hanging up, and immediately dialing again to get a more helpful briefer.
Perhaps because of encounters like that, or a particularly fierce independent streak, or just a love of self-controlled technology, a number of pilots I know disdainfully eschewed flight service briefings -- even before high-quality aviation weather information was available on the internet. But even after my skill at reading charts and interpreting raw data improved greatly, and internet sources grew sophisticated enough to duplicate much of the same information Flight Service briefers received, I still held firm to my belief in the value of a really good, local briefer. For there are some things that you can't learn from a book, or even discern from sterile forecast data -- especially on long, VFR cross-country flights into unfamiliar areas.
The best of all worlds, of course, is an old-hand briefer who's also a pilot. "Yeah, I've flown that route a number of times," I remember one telling me. "And the forecast may say 25 knots or more through 8 p.m., but those winds always tend to die down toward the end of the afternoon. If you wait until 3 to depart, I think you'll be fine."
Are they always right? No. But that extra piece of wisdom, gleaned from years of chart-interpretation, weather tracking and flying experience, gives me another valuable piece of information to put into my decision-making equation. I haven't always heeded the advice of these old pros. But in 22 years of flying, I have also regretted that decision far more often than not.
In October of 2001, I was flying my Cheetah from New York to California with a flight instructor friend. We got as far as Louisville KY with fairly good weather. But the next morning, the TV was forecasting not only thunderstorms, but tornadoes in the vicinity of Kansas City MO, which was our next stop. I called Flight Service, and lucked upon one of those "old hand" briefers.
