wrote:



Help me with this Bozeman deal. You say the city fathers are buying the
terminal radar. I presume this will be an ASR-9?

No, it's a beacon only system. I forget the number.


I gather there will not
be a tower TRACON.

BZN is a contract tower. The city bought and paid for that too. The
city was told by the FAA that if they build a tower the FAA would
include it in the contract tower program. Same as at Kalispell, FCA.


Did you say it has been finalized that ZLC will
provide the approach control services via the new ASR-X as opposed to
center radar, which I presume to be spotty in that area, at least for
terminal services.

Right now ZLC gets a plane in the vicinity and all approaches are done
non radar. The only thing finalized is that the radar is going in and
the data will be routed to ZLC. Problem is because of center rules and
inefficiencies the new radar doesn't gain them anything.


Why wouldn't they pipe this new Bozeman ASR to a nearby TRACON, like MSO
goes to Spokane and KMFR goes to Eugene?

That's the plan. We are working thru Congress right now to get that
accomplished. One of the Montana Senators is the Chairman of the
aviation commitee and our only Represenative is on the aviation
subcommittee in the House. It's only about money at this point.
Everybody agrees that the radar should be worked from a TRACON and not
the center. It takes money to send the data from ZLC to BIL. The
problem we have here is that in order to work two separate systems, ours
and BZN, we would need either two separate ARTS systems or STARS. STARS
has been so problematical they took us off the list for installation at
our new tower that opens in Aug/06.



And, Great Falls TRACON is going to shut down? Is that because it is a
USAF facility? I know that USAF TRACONS have been known to shut down but
I have never heard in recent years of an FAA TRACON shutting down.

GTF was never a USAF facility. They decommissioned the runway at the
Air Force base(GFA) several years ago and now only helicopters land
there. It is only a missile base now. There are some F16's at GTF but
that is a guard unit. GTF tower has personnel problems and have had
ever since I came to Montana. The union rep was fired not too long ago
because on 9/11 he launched airplanes after we were all told to ground
everything. Then he stole the tape of that day. How he stayed out of
jail I don't know. If the FAA wants to keep consolidating BIL is the
perfect spot to run all these radars and then contract out the resulting
VFR towers.


Do you know of any other instance where a center provides approach control
services using an ASR local to the airport, as opposed to using center
radar?

No, I don't know if it's being done anywhere. It probably is because
our ASR-11 right now goes to the center and it fills in gaps in their
coverage. They are going to do whatever software updates they need to
to make our radar a 120 mile system vs the 60 it is right now. This
will only be used by the center, our scopes will remain the same.