NATCA Bookshelf

National Office Departmental Update, Oct. 8, 2018

A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association

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TSAS Submitted by TSAS subgroup lead Paul Carroll (PCT) The week of September 11, an Operational Evaluation of the TBFM 4.9 software release was conducted. Members of the TBFM Operations Team and SMEs from field facilities attended the event. The software release contained upgrades to the TSAS program. The evaluation went very well, correcting numerous bugs in the system as well as changing command and control input to the desired functionality. We held two activities at the Tech Center during the weeks of Sept. 17 and Sept. 24, to test and evaluate the TSAS program and its operational functionality. We continue to see improvements with the program software, while some problem and discrepancy reports continue to be filed with Leidos and Raytheon, respectively. We have received enough feedback from field personnel to upgrade some of these issues to IOC critical. We are working with the TAMR and CHI teams to resolve these issues and ensure that they will be available for use prior to key site rollouts in September 2020. Week of Oct. 8, 2018 Update AIRSPACE TECHNICAL DEMONSTRATION 2 (ATD-2) Pete Slattery (CLT) is the Article 114 Representative for ATD-2. His report is below: ATD-2 NASA/FAA Integrated Departure, Arrival, and Surface System (IADS) ATD-2, designed to help the FAA and industry prove the concept of increased efficiency and throughput by combining several existing data sources into one integrated system, continues to be used daily at CLT. Phase Two of the project officially began on October 1, and very important advances to the system have occurred over the last few weeks. One important new feature is the integration of the FAA's Electronic Flight Data System, AEFS, with traffic management capabilities of ATD-2. This means both systems will communicate and share data between themselves. The primary feature of this first attempt at integrating these two systems is the release times selected by TMCs at CLT tower, and approved by the ZDC and ZTL TMUs, now appear directly on the controller tool, the electronic flight strips. Appearing on the controller EFD is information important to future Departure Metering such as The Earliest Off Block Time (EOBT), the Actual Off Block Time (AOBT), and the Target Movement Area Entry Time (TMAT). These times will be necessary in the future when controllers become active participants in Departure Metering programs. We are still a long way off from that future state, but simply having the data available for controllers now, will begin to condition them to understand what those data elements mean. Also, having more data allows controllers to have a more complete picture of the 'state' of any and every aircraft soon to be under their control. New also with this Phase Two release is gate information on the controller's electronic strips. This feature is not fully developed yet since gate conflict, and gate availability will not be implemented until sometime next year. There is ongoing development of a manner in which to display this information that closely resembles the Surface Movement Advisor (SMA) information that is currently available to tower controllers at ATL. This is a key feature of TFDM,

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