NATCA Bookshelf

Safety and Technology Department Update for the Week of Dec. 3, 2018 NAS MONITORING EQUIPMENT (NME) Corrie Conrad (PDX) is the Article 114 Representative for Navaids Monitoring Equipment (NME), Integrated Control Monitoring System (ICMS) and Remote Radio Control System (RRCS). Her report is below: There were three responses to the market survey. The PMO wanted to get a better idea of the cost of new procurement so that it could be put into the cost model as an alternative. Independent Program and Analysis (IPA) is going to look at the cost of a tech refresh of ICMS and UIC. They believe the tech refresh for ICMS would be significant to meet the design assurance level required. PMO plans to pick a preferred alternative this month. They will need to rewrite Initial Strategy and Planning Document to present to JRC. They plan to have the Initial Investment Decision made by March 20, 2019. There is no update to RRCS at this time. TRAFFIC FLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (TFMS) Ryan Jacobs (DCC) is the Article 114 Representative to the TFMS project. His report is below: R14 Surface Viewer – We had an early look at the surface viewer tool and agreed that refresh rates on the tool are much quicker than on TSDs. We discussed the need to manipulate data blocks for the tool to be useful and held a telecon with the TFDM team to get clarification on the requirements for everyone to have both read and write access to the "free text" field. The TFDM team communicated the intention as possible coordination between a tower, TRACON, and center. With the newly defined requirements for the "free text" field, that functionality will be deferred for later deployment. PDRR – The TFMS Deployment team was called in to consult with the ABRR/PDRR steering committee regarding an issue with PDRR. It was determined that if an FRC to a fix amendment is issued and Field 11 of the data block states "FRC to…" or some variation thereof, and subsequently PDRR is used to amend the same flight plan, that ERAM does not insert a new FRC into Field 11. An acceptable solution could not be reached so the decision was made to shut down PDRR for non-compliant flights until TFMS or ERAM could implement a solution. Tech Refresh – We reviewed the content and design for job aides related to the tech refresh. Job aides should identify the biggest changes and show some of the new functionality. They will also list keyboard and mouse shortcuts for common and useful functions. Additionally, we performed regression testing on updates to the Redhat operating system.

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