The email message below went out Tuesday morning to update everyone on our AWOS: As of about 2:00 PM Monday, the Caldwell Industrial Airport AWOS (Automated Weather Observing System) was back in service! The AWOS has been down for most of the past month and up and down before that as the FAA maintenance team from Boise has attempted to keep some very old equipment operational. During the recent failure I have reached out to the FAA officials responsible for the FAA-owned-and-operated weather stations throughout the Northwest Region for assistance. They are aware (from a recent on-site survey) that our AWOS is among the oldest in the system. As such, we (EUL) are near the top of their list for sites-to-be-updated-soon. The scheduled soon for us is August of 2015. I have requested that Caldwell be prioritized for action sooner than that due to the recent string of outages -- especially since the failures have a more significant impact on safety-of-flight during the varied weather patterns we observe here during Fall and Winter. Too soon to report any actual results on that request, but they have agreed to take a hard look at how they might be able to adjust their plans based on our spike in age-related AWOS issues. Hopefully the AWOS will remain operational until new equipment can be installed. The only thing that seems fairly certain at the moment is that our system will probably experience more problems before the new equipment can be installed. Thank you to all AWOS users for your patience during this difficult time as we approach the end of our AWOSs service life. Rob Oates, Airport Manager
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 16:36:00 +0000