Airplane frequency changes begin Thursday

MAT-SU — After more than two years of effort, the Federal Aviation Administration is about to implement changes it hopes fix problems that may have led to a handful of mid-air collisions in Mat-Su Borough skies.

The series of mid-air crashes came in 2011. The most serious was in July and claimed four lives when two planes collided near Amber Lake, 16 miles southwest of Talkeetna.

Tom George, Alaska regional director of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, said that when aircraft-owner groups and the FAA looked at the problem, it seemed like the pilots had been operating on different frequencies and thus weren’t communicating with one another.

It’s a problem pretty specific to rural airports. A place like Merrill Field or Anchorage International Airport has a control tower everyone talks to. But when there’s no tower, pilots talk to each other to be aware of other planes nearby.

The way the FAA decides what frequency those pilots have to be on is to assign a common traffic advisory frequency to each rural airport, with a 10-mile radius around each airport designated as the zone in which pilots need to use that frequency.

But, George said, there’s a problem in Mat-Su.

“We have what’s probably a world-class quantity of airports in the Mat-Su Valley,” he said. “I’m not aware of anywhere else in the country or even in the world that has that number of small little airports tucked away.”

He said there are something like 200 airports out here registered with the FAA.

“The problem in the Mat-Su Valley has been that the assignments have been made to these airports, but if you draw a 10 mile radius out around these airports you found you had a lot of overlap with different frequencies,” George said.

So, conceivably, two pilots could be using the correct channel but be on different frequencies and thus not hear each other. Those pilots would be unaware other planes were in the area, with sometimes disastrous results.

The solution was to draw lines around larger geographic areas and assign those areas frequencies.

George said the changes go into effect May 29.

“If you aren’t religious about buying new flight charts, or updating your GPS databases, plan to do so with this charting cycle, as approximately 78 airport (common traffic advisory frequencies) will change on that date,” reads a notice George’s group posted to its website about the changes.

George said the FAA also will be changing its records for these frequencies and people can get this information easily online. He said the group working on the changes made lists of which airports are on which new frequency, and even went so far as to try to find common landing spots that aren’t airports — gravel bars and the like — and note which frequency people should use there.

He said that the goal now is to get the word out, to let people know the changes are coming.

George said the years leading up to this involved quite a number of meetings and discussions.

“So far I think the feedback has been very good in that everybody has said that we needed to do something different and we needed this simplified,” he said.

What friction there was came on where those boundaries around the new geographic areas should be.

“That, of course, is why we had a working group with a pretty good cross-section of the users and the government groups to be able to sort through that and come up with the best compromises we could,” he said.