FAA Safety Seminars cancelled

[Tony Starke]

FYI:

 

GovernmentShutdown
Notice Number: NOTC7573

The FAASTeam is currently shut down because of a lapse in appropriations. This prohibits FAA employees from being available to facilitate, present, or attend safety seminars. We will also not have access to our system to cancel meetings. There is potential that you will arrive at a safety meeting, and find there is no one to provide the meeting.

We are very grateful for the support of our FAASTeam Representatives. Any safety meeting that is produced by our Representatives who are not FAA employees may continue.

We ask for your patience, and apologize for the inconvenience. The FAASTeam will reopen once funding has been restored.

[kortopates]

Interesting, I assume this notice was from a specific FSDO and not nation wide since I see no mention of it on FAASafety.gov.

Anyway, I wouldn't take this very seriously, as a Lead FASTeam rep at my FSDO, only the FAASTeam Program manager is an actual FAA employee, otherwise the entire FAASTeam group member are all volunteers and our ability to carry on won't be affected by this. The one exception is getting new SPANs events approved because approval is limited to the managers which are all FAA employees. But since events need to be in the system generally a full 4 weeks in advance to go through the approval process in time for airman notification this shouldn't have any real bearing for a few weeks. There is the occasional seminar given by or supported by a FAA employees, including FAASteam Program managers, and others including ATC TRACON reps that have out reach responsibilities that could be affected in the near term but these are rare.

If anyone has concerns, my suggestion would be to call or email the event POC on the announcement for any upcoming event they might be concerned about to verify it will still be held. But I expect the vast majority of these won't be cancelled. But I can't really say about FSDO's other than San Diego. 

[EricJ]

I got an email to that effect today from FAASafety.gov.    There's probably nobody there to update the website.

[201er]

Does this mean the FAA is shut down until further notice as well?