NATCA Bookshelf

That same week, TBFM Ops Team members visited ZDC in support of Northeast Corridor work for PHL Metering. The initial intent of the adjacent site visits is to gather information for Metering and discuss future work with the facility representatives. As well, a presentation of IDAC was given to ZAB in preparation for upcoming training and installation at ZAB and four towers (PHX, TUS, ELP, and ABQ). Initial site visits at the towers have already been completed and implementation is planned for early November. The following week of Sept. 10, the Ops team was at the Atlantic City Leidos location for the new 4.9 release Ops Evaluation testing. This was the first and is not planned for national release, but for TSAS improvements and enhancements to be tested. Also, during that week, a small team visited ZTL in support of ATD-2 for CLT. The Ops Team was asked to train ZTL's TMCs on IDAC so that more departure flows can be used in the near future utilizing the ATD-2 system. ZTL will set departure flows for CLT (similar to when Towers utilize IDAC) and the CLT ATD-2 system will then be utilized to schedule departures. The Ops Team will return in early 2019 to train the remaining IDAC Towers for ZTL so that the full system can be utilized. During the training on the support system sluggish behavior was noticed and reported. After testing this TBFM, SLE and Leidos reported that this was due to Virtual Machines that are utilized in TBFM. The support system is particularly susceptible to this behavior which the team has seen at other sites. The contractor is working on a VM tuner that will hopefully maximize the utilization of these virtual machines in the future to avoid this undesired behavior. This behavior is not expected to affect Ops as there are additional machines on the Operational system that can handle the increased usage of the TBFM system. During the week of Sept. 17, the Northeast Corridor (NEC) Team visited the Tech Center along with TBFM Leadership. Meetings were conducted with Adaptation personnel from the FAA and Leidos to discuss plans moving forward with development of the enhanced PHL arrival system. A meeting was also held with Lab personnel from the Tech Center to discuss the usage of labs at the Tech Center to test PHL adaptations in the future. Additionally, a group from the Ops team was at ZOA for verification of the LAX T2T system delivery. Unfortunately, the initial delivered system was set up to allow ZOA to schedule into the legacy LAX arrival system instead of the new 'coupled' system that they use. The Ops team members on site identified the issues and, working with SLE and Leidos, the appropriate changes were made and delivered out to the site for testing the same week. Once the new system was delivered it was verified in the support lab as working correctly. This will allow ZOA Towers with IDAC installed to schedule departures directly into the LAX arrival system. In the last week of September, TBFM Ops Team members visited ZOB in support of NEC work for PHL Metering. Similar to other adjacent site visits, the intent was to gather information for PHL Metering and discuss future work with the facility representatives. Additionally, there were discussions about PIT's early departure scheduling into PHL, which is also a part of the NEC planning. Overall the meetings went well, and a lot of good information was exchanged between the facility and the NEC Ops team group.

• Cover