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How to Verify an NWSA Certification
Carriers and tower owners are writing NWSA certification into MSAs, which means the person signing off a crew now has to prove it. Here is how to check a technician's TTT-1, TTT-2, A&L, ARC or Foreman certification, what the result means, and the shortcuts that go wrong.
1. Use NWSA's own verification tool
NWSA issues every certification as a digital credential and runs a free public verification tool for it. Ask the technician for the certification number on their NWSA digital credential, then look it up. The result shows whether the credential is active and when it expires. No account is needed and it takes under a minute.
The tool lives on NWSA's credential platform; the current link is on nws-a.org. Always start from NWSA's site rather than a link someone hands you, so you know you are looking at NWSA's record and not a screenshot.
2. Read the result properly
- Active, with an expiration date — the certification is valid until the end of that month. NWSA certifications run five years.
- Expired — NWSA allows no grace period. The holder is not certified until they pass the current exam again; there is no "renewal" without a new pass. (ARC is the one exception on paper: its recertification requirements were not yet finalized in the REV 10/25 handbook.)
- Not found — the number is wrong, the name does not match, or the credential does not exist. Treat it as unverified until the technician produces a working number.
The ladder tells you more than one line: A&L Specialty, ARC Specialty and Foreman each require an active TTT-2, and TTT-2 requires an active TTT-1. A valid Foreman therefore implies the two technician levels underneath it; a Foreman card with a lapsed TTT-2 is a question to ask.
3. What is not proof
- A photo of a card. Cards are easy to forward and say nothing about whether the credential is still active.
- A training-provider certificate. Exam prep — including ours — is not certification. Only NWSA issues the credential.
- "Certified" on a resume with no number. Ask for the number; every NWSA credential has one.
4. Verifying a whole crew
For a crew of ten, ten lookups is a morning. Two ways to shorten it:
- Collect certification numbers and expiration months at onboarding, then re-check the ones due to expire in the next 12 months. NWSA requires recertification to be completed inside that window, so an expiration inside a year is a crew-planning problem, not just a compliance one.
- Hire from a board where the check is already done. On our verified technician board, every profile was checked against NWSA's tool before it went live — the badge shows the date — and profiles drop off automatically when the certification expires. Browsing is free; you pay only to unlock a technician's contact details.
5. Getting a crew certified
If the check turns up a technician who is not certified yet, or is coming up on the five-year mark, the exam is $274 per attempt with no discount on a retake and a 30-day wait after a fail. Our crew pricing puts interactive prep for all five certifications on one key per technician, with a manager console that shows who has finished and what they scored, so you are not sending anyone to a $274 exam blind.