At the whims of weather reporting: How village travel is affected when crucial FAA equipment goes down

Rural Alaskans know the drill. Bad weather can ground flights and interfere with one’s travel plans. Or, if it’s not the weather, flights may get grounded when the FAA’s weather reporting system does not work and commercial aircraft can’t fly between communities. That’s more than an inconvenience for over 80 percent of Alaskans who live in communities only accessible by aircraft.
Recently, Shishmaref’s FAA Automated Weather Observation System experienced such an outage and was not reporting the weather for days on end, leaving the community without commercial air service. Nobody could travel in or out of Shishmaref, no mail, no groceries, no medication could be transported to the community.
The school’s Assistant Principal Maggie Gray was stuck in Nome en route home from a conference, others had been not able to go home for longer. Curtis Nayokpuk Jr. and three of his friends were determined to attend the AFN basketball tournament and decided to use an adventurous route by boating from Shishmaref to Teller, driving to Nome and they indeed made it in time to the tournament in Anchorage.
Having lived in the Bering Strait School District region for nine years, the Assistant Principal Gray said she understands bad weather holds, but a misfunctioning piece of weather reporting equipment? “I was like, well, there’s got to be something that we can do.” So she drafted some emails, and sent them out to the FAA, to the senators of Alaska, “basically, anybody that I thought could get some results,” she said. The first response from the FAA emails was basically that they weren’t in the office due to the lapse in funding, she said. Her reaction was: that is absolutely just not okay. “So I started with Alaska’s Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan,” she said. She also wrote to state Senator Donny Olson. And posted a plea for help on social media. “I was honestly quite shocked to get the feedback,” she said.
Senator Olson’s office helped and a few days later, the part necessary to fix the FAA system arrived in Shishmaref, she picked it up from the airport when during a stretch of good weather planes could fly and she was told a technician would soon follow.
As of now, the AWOS is still not 100 percent reporting but it at least allowed Bering Air to resume some flights and catching up with passengers, mail and goods. 
 The issue is not isolated to the Bering Strait region, nor is it a temporary occurrence. Will Day, executive director with the Alaska Air Carriers Association, said Alaska’s weather infrastructure pertaining to aviation is “an ongoing and chronic issue, particularly the reliability with outages and failures and maintenance related issues that stems predominantly from the remote nature of a lot of these weather stations.”
 

Photo by Jenni Monet
PLAYING AT ALL COSTS— Shishmaref’s Curtis Nayokpuk Jr., left, was determined to travel to the AFN Basketball tournament in Anchorage despite the AWOS outage induced airplane service interruption. He and three others decided to make the long journey from Anchorage by boat to Teller, by road to Nome and by plane to Anchorage.

So, how does AWOS work?
Bering Air President Russell Rowe, Director of Operations Fen Kinneen and Chief Pilot Nathaniel Olson in an interview with the Nome Nugget explained how FAA AWOS outages affect their operations. First, it’s a complicated system. 
Fen Kinneen explained that the Federal Aviation Administration’s Automated Weather Observation System, or AWOS for short, is an FAA-owned and maintained piece of equipment that has been around for a long time. “It’s an older piece of equipment run on Windows XP, if that gives you a sense of the age of it,” Kinneen said. “The instrument monitors a number of weather parameters, some of which are required for us to fly in instrument conditions, meaning solely by reference to the instruments in the aircraft.” Those are called instrument flight rules. When the weather is clear, pilots can fly under visual flight rules. “So sometimes when we have these outages, it’s not really known to the public, because we can fly under a different set of rules when it’s nice and sunny out,” said Kinneen. 
Day, with the Air Carriers Association, explained that there is the FAA’s AWOS and also ASOS, which is automated surface observation systems, owned by the National Weather Service. “Those two types of systems are placed across the state and sort of a comprehensive network to provide as much weather data as possible,” he said. “In aviation, when all of those stations function properly, it allows for two different types of air travel. So there’s what’s called visual flight rules, and then instrument flight rules. Visual flight rules means that you can fly anywhere you can see. Of course, it’s more complex, but that’s the concept. And then instrument flight rules means that you can fly where you cannot see specific paths that are charted through the sky. And so if you want to operate as a commercial air carrier in Alaska reliably, the best method to do so is to fly IFR and VFR, because it opens many opportunities for you to get to and from your point of departure to your destination,” Day said.
If AWOS or ASOS are not reporting in a way that dispatchers and pilots are able to access that information, then those aircraft going IFR cannot access those locations.
 Bering Air’s Russell Rowe added that each approach is different for every village, and there are different minimum weather requirements for altitude and visibility. “So we don’t dispatch the flight out of Nome to those destinations unless it’s above those minimums for the approach,” he said. 
The AWOS system comes into play when pilots don’t fly under visual flight rules. Rowe explained that the AWOS systems deliver the official weather that Bering Air is looking at to make that decision whether to go or not to go. “So if the AWOS is reporting something lower than the approach allows you to go down to then there’s no point in going there,” Rowe said. If the AWOS is not reporting at all and there is reason to believe that there’s cloud coverage, obscuring mountains between Nome and the destination, the planes don’t fly. Without the weather information at the destination, the planes would not be cleared to land. 
 
How is AWOS information made available?
Lately, it was Shishmaref’s FAA AWOS that had problems, but regionwide, the AWOS reporting is not consistent. After the FAA could sent out a technician to fix the AWOS, it failed again to report. But it was just the internet portion that failed. The information is still available by telephone and can be listened to on VHF radio. 
Accessing the official weather reporting from the AWOS system is key to make the decisions whether to fly or not to fly under the instrument flight rules. But the reliability is questionable. “We have some that are really reliable and work all the time,” added Kinneen. “And then there’s some that seem to have more problems than others, and it seems to actually rotate. I can’t really give a rhyme or reason to how it’s when the failures or why the failures are occurring.”
 
What can be done?
Kinneen said that over the last few years, the outages have become a high-visibility topic. This has spurred action on the regulatory and  legislative side.
As Alaska faces an aviation accident rate more than double the national average, the FAA and the federal DOT have begun to identify solutions. The federal Department of Transportation announced recently to build a state-of-the-art air traffic control system to enhance safety in the sky, reduce delays, and provide air traffic controllers with modern, reliable equipment. This overhaul includes the addition of 174 new weather stations for the state and a modernization of flight service systems. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 authorized $25 million annually for FAA Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative from FY 2025 through 2028. According to Senator Dan Sullivan’s office, the FAA also announced it will be expanding the FAA’s use of satellites in Alaska—growing from four testing sites to 16—to help support connectivity at weather monitoring sites, particularly in the more remote parts of the state. 
“Alaska has long had issues with reliable weather information for the aviation community. The 2024 reauthorization, of which Senator Sullivan was an author, required the FAA to fix telecommunications connections to address those needs,” a press release from Sullivan reads. However, these improvements have yet to manifest. After a yearlong examination of safety issues specific to Alaska, the FAA made a list of recommendations, topped by the need to increase and improve weather data reporting and forecasting. The recommendation read: Install Automated Weather Observing Systems at airports that don’t have them and where the systems would have the biggest safety benefit and continue testing a new technology called Visual Weather Observation System, or VWOS.
 
In the meantime, the Alaska Air Carriers Association is participating in a joint industry-government initiative called the Alaska’s weather working group. It is a combination of the state of Alaska DOT, Alaska Region FAA and the general aviation industry. The group, says Will Day of the AACA, meets on a regular basis and discuss which stations need to be prioritized, to be repaired and fixed, and where new stations are needed.
Day said that in 2024 Senator Murkowski organized a meeting of stakeholders in Yakutat to talk about the significance of the ongoing weather reporting issue. “She basically got everybody into the room to start brainstorming what could be done, which led to the creation of that weather working group,” Day said.
Day said federal funds have been made available through the Don Young Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative, which is formerly known as the FAA Alaska Safety Initiative, or FAASI, and provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill. 
While exact dollar amounts are unknown yet, Day said that the working group is creating a task list prioritizing weather stations repair or replacements. 
As for upgrading technology, he said, “We’re exploring the possibility of using what’s called a VWOS, which is a visual weather observation system, and it’s significantly cheaper and as I understand, a higher technology than an AWOS or an ASOS.” He said the AWOS cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million per unit, whereas VWOS costs somewhere around $200,000. 
 
How to inspire change?
Day said individuals can affect change by reporting problems with the systems and how it affects one’s life. “Those stories are the most powerful things, in my opinion, for change,” Day said. “When you have somebody who relies on reliable air service for critical medication and doesn’t receive that medication and then suffers a consequence, potentially a life threatening consequence, those stories make impacts. And they make people want to change things. So the more you can push that information to us, to the delegation, to anybody who will listen, the more power we have to make those changes.” 
Back to Shishmaref. When planes could fly again under visual flight rules, the assistant principal Maggie Gray who has emailed to state and federal leadership to draw attention to the AWOS situation, happened to be at the Shishmaref airstrip to pick up a person when the replacement part for the AWOS system came in. As is her routine, she helped unload the plane and the agent pointed to a box saying, “This is fragile, it’s the part that keeps us coming here.”
“And I said, Are you saying that’s the part? And he’s like, ‘Yeah, this is it,’” she said. “I unloaded it off the plane, and I went, grabbed my phone real quick. I said, I got to take a selfie with this because it was just, it was just cool.”

With reporting by Jenni Monet.