Meet JoAnn ‘Tinmisuun’ Ford, Alaska Aviation’s Greatest Advocate
For Public Service Recognition Week, the FAA is celebrating the many public servants who help to keep our skies safe.
Story written by Chris Troxell, FAA Office of Communications
Tinmisuun, meaning “airplane,” is the name the Alaska Iñupiat people have given to the FAA’s JoAnn Ford for her generous role and unrelenting commitment to advancing aviation infrastructure development, satellite-based navigation and safety in Alaska over her 35-plus-year federal career.
Ford’s numerous contributions to Alaska’s aviation system garnered her a prestigious award recently, as the Alaska Air Carriers Association recognized the aircraft navigation expert with its highest honor earlier this month at the 2020 Annual Convention and Trade Show in Anchorage.
The AACA presented Ford with the Arlo Livingston Award, created in 1983 in memory of a man who made a lifelong contribution to the aviation industry and helped to start the association in 1966. The AACA considers the award each year but only gives it when they identify a deserving candidate. Ford is just the sixth person in 37 years to receive it.
“There is no doubt her generous, faithful and tireless support of the Alaskan aviation industry has played a significant role in where Alaska aviation is today,” the AACA’s representative said in his presentation, also noting that Ford’s interest in aviation began at a young age, riding in toy airplanes and volunteering at local airports.
“It was truly humbling; I have a passion for helping the state of Alaska, and I feel it is very important that the agency continues to support the state,” said Ford, the navigation programs expert and Alaska liaison for Enterprise Services in the Air Traffic Organization’s Program Management Organization.
Ford has experienced, with great dismay, the impact of aviation navigation limitations in Alaska and became fully invested in improving flight navigation for the state’s pilot community. She recounted a conversation with a parent whose child passed away “because an aircraft couldn’t get into the village to take the child to the hospital … to see that over and over again, you can’t help but feel there’s got to be something you can do to help the state.”
From air traffic controller to navigations professional, Ford has made a major impact on the state of aviation in Alaska.
After working for a couple years for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Ford started atthe FAA as an air traffic controller in the early 1980s. She worked at multiple facilities in Florida, including Vero Beach Tower and Miami Center. As a board member of the Professional Women Controllers, she met the FAA administrator for engineering and development, who thought she was a good candidate for a position in aircraft navigation. This was during a critical transitional period in the early 1990s when the global positioning system was becoming recognized as the way of future navigation.
“In 1994, I took my first position at [FAA] headquarters, helping to implement GPS into the air traffic system,” Ford said. “That was my first introduction to satellite-based navigation. I became smitten with the GPS bug, and said, ‘This is where I belong.’”
From 1994 to about 2000, Ford helped the agency implement GPS approaches and airspace changes into the national airspace system, and began working with Alaska aviation officials on implementing the new technology. “By then we were looking beyond GPS and at augmenting the GPS signal with what is now called the Wide Area Augmentation System, or WAAS.”
WAAS improves the accuracy, integrity and availability of GPS signals, enabling aircraft to navigate at lower altitudes than possible without an augmented signal. This signal augmentation is essential for Alaska’s pilots flying through high terrain and in rapidly changing weather conditions. Ford has worked over the years to ensure WAAS coverage expanded over as much of Alaska as possible, with triple coverage redundancy.
As recognized by the AACA, Ford had an active role in implementation of WAAS via the Capstone program in the early 2000s, by which southeast Alaska saw a significant reduction in aviation accidents — particularly fatal ones. As Capstone’s navigation expert, Ford was instrumental in publishing original GPS overlays and satellite-based routes, and directing funding to enable public WAAS localizer approaches in Alaska.
To help the FAA’s Global Navigation Satellite Systems initiatives and industry reach their goals, Ford brought visibility to the benefits of WAAS in Alaska with the first-ever WAAS Localizer Performance with Vertical Guidance capability, or LPV, for the Boeing 737/200s, and the first-ever WAAS LPV equipage with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast installed in a B737/700.
Ford continued to work with the state and industry on identifying airports in need of WAAS and was critical to the effort to incentivize WAAS equipage in aircraft. “We entered into mutually beneficial partnerships to demonstrate the benefits aircraft can get if they equip with WAAS,” she explained.
As unmanned aircraft systems (commonly called drones) have emerged with great prominence in the last 10 years, Ford has been influential in integrating the new entrants.
From 2012–2014, Ford contributed significantly to the integration and leveraging of commercial UAS flights in Alaska. She was part of the team that achieved the first commercial flight of a UAS when Insitu’s ScanEagle completed a 36-minute flight over the Chukchi Sea in 2013. The FAA certified the drone to survey ocean ice floes and migrating whales in Arctic oil exploration areas, and to conduct beyond-visual-line-of-sight validation flights, including railroad track inspection in New Mexico. Ford was solely responsible for developing sample data criteria collected by the flights. The drone has since been inducted into the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Dulles, Virginia.
Safe drone integration is critical to safety of the NAS, and Ford is spearheading the first WAAS-equipped large UAS cargo delivery, in collaboration with Sabrewing Aircraft Company, to the remote Bering Sea islands of St. George and St. Paul.
Ford has has written articles on the operational applications of GPS and WAAS, featured in the ICAO Journal, Avionics Magazine, Alaska Airmen Association Transponder, and other technical publications.
What are Ford’s hobbies? Everything aviation.
She is a lifetime member of the Iditarod as a volunteer for the Iditarod Air Force, a group of general aviation pilots that aids dogsled teams across Alaska’s remote interior, and she volunteers annually at the Reno Air Races. “I’m on the pit crew for the T-6 Abracadabra,” she said.
Ford added, “I’m training to be a docent [volunteer guide] at the Air and Space Museum, and I collect original Native Alaskan aviation art, mostly of floatplanes.”
Ford voices her passion about the FAA continuing to support enhancements to Alaska’s aviation navigation infrastructure, and she hopes the agency will continue to do so when she retires in the next couple of years, following her motto: “Finding ways to say yes, not reasons to say no.”
