TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- The 211 active duty and civilian personnel who manage the Air Force Flight Standards Agency recently consolidated and moved into their new headquarters located within a newly renovated section of the Armed Forces Reserve Center.
The AFFSA’s headquarters is now strategically located directly across the street from Tinker Air Force Base at 5316 S. Douglas Blvd. in Bldg. 8400.
AFFSA Executive Director Ed Wright said the move allows agency members to be closer to Tinker AFB’s logistics support for air traffic control and landing systems, plus its central location is advantageous when AFFSA members need to travel to make repairs across the globe.
“We remotely monitor and maintain the health and status of all the Air Forces’ navigational needs, including Tinker AFB’s,” he said. “From our Remote Maintenance Center here, we can dial into the systems and make changes in our operating performance and we do that for all of the Air Force.
“We monitor the health of the NAVAIDS (navigational infrastructure), instrument landing systems and tactical air navigation.”
Wright said AFFSA shares the building with other tenants, including units from the Marine Corps, Naval Reserve and the Joint Primary Aircraft Trainer Program Office.
“We are a field operating agency with an Air Force-wide mission and we report directly to the Air Force/A3O, director of Current Operations,” he said. “AFFSA was relocated to Oklahoma from what was then called Andrews AFB more than a decade ago as a part of a 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission decision.”
For the past nine years, AFFSA was housed at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City, but Wright said once the flying mission partnership with the FAA ended, the need to be close to the FAA was no longer necessary.
“There was talk about housing us at Vance AFB, Altus AFB and other locations across the Air Force, but former Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex Commander Lt. Gen. Lee K. Levy II suggested the Armed Forces Reserve Center as an option because the space in Bldg. 8400 had been vacant for about 10 years, had room for two agencies and would save the Air Force money by not building a new facility,” he said.
Wright said AFFSA has many meetings and interactions with the Pentagon and their staff travels often.
“When the NAVAIDS fail and we can’t fix them online then we have to send people to the facility,” he said. “We also have a presence in Japan and Germany maintaining NAVAIDS across the Pacific and Europe.”
Wright said another unique aspect of AFFSA is that the organization teaches several types of courses at their headquarters, including maintenance training for navigation aid specialists. It also has an Advanced Instruments School and a terminal instruments procedures course.
“We’re really unique because we teach an average of 26 pilots from all areas of the military, including allied pilots,” he said. “We average about 312 students per year. We also write the Air Force’s flying instructions that govern air traffic control operations, airfield management and the core Air Force instructions.
Wright said all Air Force pilots are required to take an instrument refresher course. The AIS course prepares Air Force pilots on how to instruct this course so they can go back to their unit’s pilots and teach them what they’ve learned.
On AFFSA’s first floor, there is a mock-up of navigational aids that is used to teach maintenance personnel. Wright said future plans include installing a whole instrument landing system behind the building that will be designed to teach maintenance technicians how to work on such systems in the field.