Flight Standards inspectors in FAA field offices take “accident standby” duty on a rotating schedule. During the 28 years I was in four Great Lakes region offices, the inspector on duty carried an electronic beeper activated by a phone number or a signal from the regional office. There’s a duty officer in each of the eight FAA regional offices who receives notifications of accidents, incidents or “occurrences” from FAA facilities like flight service stations, control towers and centers, and from law enforcement agencies. Outside regular office hours he “beeps” the designated inspector in the district involved as well as the National Transportation Safety Board, other government entities and people who “need to know.”
Planning these standby schedules caused considerable angst, and FSDO managers spent untold hours devising lists that factored in inspectors’ seniority and scheduled training but with care not to assign the duty on holidays to somebody who’d been “in the barrel” the previous year. Woe betide the inspector who didn’t submit his vacation leave request before the cutoff date. A faction demanded pay for all off-duty time they were on standby and eventually voted in a union. Finally, management compromised by continuing to assign the duty but agreeing that inspectors didn’t have to be accessible or even answer a page. The regional duty officer would go down his list until he found somebody — eventually the manager — who would respond.
