FSSA is the FAA / TSA Flight School Security Awareness course. This course runs in your web browser. It can be used by a flight instructor, flight school worker, or other aviation employee to satisfy the needs for initial or recurrent flight school security training.
You can access it directly from the web site: FSSA Training Course, or download a copy to run locally, or at a site without web access FSSA-Extract.zip.
However, FSSA indirectly has a problem which can cause you quite a bit of difficulties. It is possible to run the program to completion only to find it impossible to print the resulting completion certificate! This is not actually a problem due only to FSSA; however because it does not allow you to replay the printing without re-doing the entire course, it is part of the problem.
The problem encountered is with the Adobe Flash Player, which is used to run the course. Adobe Flash is security minded, and wants to keep unfriendly Flash applications from damaging your computing environment. However, because FSSA needs to use some of those resources, a conflict arises. Worse yet, if you fix the conflict, you will need to re-run the entire course to output the completion certificate.
So the question is, how can you tell if everying is working
OK before running the course?
That turns out to be simple.
The starting web page has a big
Homeland Security
logo on it, with a
Start Here to Launch Course
link below it.
Once you start the course with that link, you will
see the first page of the course itself.
On the first page of the presentation
is a menu in the top right with the options of
If it doesn't display correctly you should be taken to the Adobe Flash Control Panel as an option.
NOTE Even if the above works it is NOT an absolute guarantee that all of FSS will work correctly. This is because it is possible to setup Flash such that just one thing like that works. While that is not the normal case, it would be a shame if someone had just enabled the HELP entry, and not the reset of the parameters.
If it isn't displayed, you can use the link above (or the other one below) to access it.
You will want to access the Global Privacy Settings Panel. This allows you to specify internet content which may access.
For example, I downloaded the FSSA course, and burned it on to a CDROM.
That CDROM mounts as drive D:\ on this computer.
I want to ADD the entry D:/ to the
Edit Locations list.
Please note that I used a forward slash, '/', not the DOS
reverse slash.
That is because URLS use forward slashes, and the flash player
is examining the URL, not the filename.
If in doubt, add both!
Unfortunately the above early test may not work to positively identify situations where FSSA will not print correctly.
In that case, you can either bring up the above Global Privacy Manager and add the URL for the FSSA web site. You can also just select Allways Allow, and this disable it after running FSSA.
If this happens, you may still be able to print.
Try right-clicking in the Certificate Window,
and selecting Print.. from the Flash Menu.
It will display a normal Windows print dialog, which lets you choose
a printer to use.
Hint -- Select Landscape mode so the certificate prints full page instead of using part of a page.