Flight service station

The precise services offered by stations vary by country, but typical FSS services may include providing preflight briefings including weather and notices to airmen (NOTAMs); filing, opening, and closing flight plans; monitoring navigational aids (NAVAIDs); collecting and disseminating pilot reports (PIREPs) and airport surface weather observations; offering traffic advisories to aircraft on the ground or in flight; relaying instructions or clearances from air traffic control; relaying information from or about airborne aircraft to their home bases, military bases or homeland security, providing weather advisories to aircraft inflight, initiating search and rescue on missing VFR aircraft, and providing assistance in an emergency.

[7] Inflight – which the pilots call “Radio” (which is the ICAO standard callsign for a generic air-to-ground advisory station and employed for a number of functions worldwide), activates, cancels, and alters VFR flight plans.

They relay IFR and SVFR clearances to aircraft on the ground either by phone or through their frequencies when there is no direct method of communication with the air traffic control facility governing the area.

The United States FSS radio frequencies are published in several FAA publications, including airport facility directories (AFD), VFR sectional maps, and IFR low and high altitude en route charts.

In addition, some (often more remote) airports now also have stations called AFIS in accordance with international nomenclature, but this is implemented as an ATIS or AWOS-like recording, not a live service.

[9] Leidos until early 2016 had another inflight position called Flight Watch, which was dedicated to updating weather for aircraft en route.

Flight Data is responsible for coordination with other air traffic facilities, U.S Customs and Homeland security, the Fire Service, military baseops, airport managers and law enforcement.

LMFS added an option for pilots in 2013 called Surveillance Enhanced Search and Rescue, SE-SAR,[11] which allows them to keep track of en route aircraft via satellite.

Currently, a private non-profit corporation, Nav Canada, operates both FSS/FIC and air traffic control and has significantly modernized the system, which involved the closing of some local FSSs.

However, the company in turn created six large Flight Information Centres (FICs) situated at airports in Halifax, Quebec City, London, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Kamloops.

The FICs also have large areas they are overseeing and have networks of RCOs, some of which are co-located with FSS or air traffic control sites.

Quebec City, North-Bay and Kamloops FIC also assist and oversee the "Community Aerodrome Radio Station" (CARS) program.