Aviation Relations
Aviation Relations
Small airports operate critical infrastructure across navigation, lighting, weather, communications, and supporting systems. The information needed to understand that infrastructure is often spread across manuals, vendors, records, inboxes, and the people who know the equipment best.
No airport too small to see clearly
An ILS, a DME, an AWOS, approach lighting. Each one has its own operational role, maintenance requirements, documentation, technical support relationships, and FAA framework. Each also has its own answer to a basic question: who is responsible when something changes, fails, or ages out?
The equipment does what it was designed to do. Understanding everything around it is often the harder part.
When a system goes down, a contractor changes, budget season arrives, or an FAA question comes up, the airport needs answers. Who is verified to maintain this? Where is the manual? When was the last ground check? What records exist and where. Assembling those answers takes real effort when the information is spread across five different places.
That is the picture Aviation Relations helps airports build first.
And underneath the paperwork, the infrastructure itself has been changing. Carrier circuits that used to be isolated copper now run over IP. Vendor remote access paths that used to be point-to-point now ride shared networks. Those changes arrived quietly, for legitimate reasons, and almost none of them came with a conversation about what changed. Once the operational picture is clearer, that is the natural next conversation, and the assessment captures the starting points for it.
Who This Is For
Smaller commercial service and general aviation airports that own or are responsible for non-federal navigation aids, approach lighting, or weather systems, even when a vendor maintains them, another party monitors them, and the documentation lives in a filing cabinet, an inbox, and someone's memory. Ownership, maintenance, monitoring, and support are not always the same party, and that relationship is part of what the assessment brings into focus.
If your airport has an ILS, DME, AWOS, or approach lighting, and the honest answer to "Is all of that documented somewhere?" is "probably, partly," then this was built for you.
If the FAA owns and maintains the systems at your field, the assessment will tell you that, too, and explain what would change if that ever changes. Knowing which side of that line you are on is worth ten minutes by itself.
How It Works
The Non-Federal Airport Infrastructure Assessment consists of 23 questions, takes about 10 minutes, and is answered by whoever knows the airport best. You receive a written report covering what governs each system you reported and what it asks of the airport, what your answers bring into focus across maintenance, documentation, licensing, monitoring, and vendor arrangements, which findings may be candidates for grant-funded capital projects and which are operating responsibilities, who to contact at which FAA office for what, and a prioritized 30, 90, and 180 day roadmap, plus three things you can do in the next 72 hours with no budget at all. Every report is reviewed before it goes out and arrives by email, typically within one business day.
You walk away with a written record. Useful for budget season, contractor conversations, grant scoping, and the day an FAA question arrives.
The findings belong to you. No vendor recommendation attached. No follow-on obligation.
Free for smaller commercial service and general aviation airports.
Latest Insights
When something happens at another airport, you want to know what it means for your systems. These pieces translate real events into operational implications, written by someone who has worked inside the systems involved. Five to ten per year, when something is worth writing about.
Teddy Cooper
Aviation systems experience across military and federal service.
Hands-on experience with ILS localizers and glideslopes, terminal DME, airfield lighting (PAPI, MALSR, tower and pilot-controlled radio lighting), and remote monitoring (RMM). Earlier hands-on experience with AWOS. Systems-level knowledge of VOR and SCADA.
MSIT, Information Security specialization. CompTIA CySA+.
Most people who work in OT security have never commissioned an ILS. Most people who have commissioned an ILS have never thought in network terms. The assessment methodology requires both. That combination is what Aviation Relations brings.
All consulting activity is conducted in a personal capacity, independent of any federal employment.
Aviation Relations. So airports can answer the question when it gets asked.
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Need to know:
All consulting activity conducted by Aviation Relations is in a personal capacity, independent of any federal employment. Content is based on publicly available information and does not represent FAA policy, positions, or endorsements.
Aviation Relations does not provide Part 171 equipment compliance consulting or services. Work is conducted using personal time and resources.