NATCA Bookshelf

Mr. Grider and Trey Madrid, NATCA member on the CO group from the Command Center, took time to brief the attendees at CFS. Although it was a very high-level briefing, several attendees contacted Mr. Grider afterwards with many different questions and recommendations to help make the NAS safer and better prepared for facility outages. The CO group is now preparing to travel to all 20 CONUS Centers during the next several years to continue building better OCP's. The group will be visiting ZNY, ZDC, ZTL, and N90 in December. DATACOMM Chad Geyer (ZLA) is the Article 114 Representative for DataComm. His report is below: Controller Pilot Data Link Communication (CPDLC) sites are now sending over 52,000 clearances a week. Version 12.5 is deployed to all facilities. There is one issue with the 12.5 build that will leave a flight ID stuck in the pick list. This is a case of a flight not being removed from the Pick List after it was tagged as a MUL and the aircraft departs. The program office worked with IFCET on a schedule to build a new release that would fix the issue. The date provided was not much different than the 12.6 release and would delay the 12.6 release by several months. The issue with a 12.6 delay is that there are enhancements that are needed prior to an ERAM EAE200 release. En Route CPDLC is being turned on at targeted times at ZME, ZKC and ZID. ZID did fall back from 24/7 operations due to message delivery failures. ERAM software is working great and controller training is completed. The issue is that about 2-3 percent of the messages are failing to be delivered or are being delivered later than expected. This causes increased workload on the controller. As these runs are continued, data collection continues to find network and avionics issues that are being fixed real time. The support of the key sites to document these issues is very beneficial to the program. As fixes are implemented and new baselines for data collection are drawn, the program office can improve the performance of the network. The network is owned by ARINC and SITA and managed by Harris. The FAA pays for the network delivery service. The network has been running this way for many years, but until the FAA started running CPDLC, these issues were not tracked to the magnitude that they are now. ATC operational messages need to be delivered at a higher success rate than we are currently seeing. Some issues are software issues in core processing, some are in radio tower processing, and some are related to avionics software. As the system is tested and debugged, performance will improve. There have been at least five fixes to the network and several avionics issues have been discovered. The program office continues to work with the key sites to find a level of operational acceptability to run the system in a 24/7 operation. ENROUTE AUTOMATION WORKGROUP (ERAW) Julio Henriques (ZNY) leads the ERAW efforts for NATCA. Rex Jackson (ZDC) provides the report below:

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