A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/1182646
feed to be able to test future changes to the system. The major drawback in the current system is that the secondary support string does not update so the operational system does not exactly match the system they are testing with. The plan is to work towards a TBFM planning tool that will be relatively simplistic and do what the current systems does, but adds the functionality of constantly updating itself to mirror the operational TBFM system. The team members along with others met for this follow-up meeting to discuss their findings and ways to move forward with this planning tool development. During the week of Sept. 9, the TBFM team Co-Leads along with the NEC SME Leads visited the Command Center to go over current and future equipment and training needs in regard to TBFM. Program Office technical support and NATCA FAST support was onsite as well. This was the second meeting to go over these topics, and working together with the NATCA and management DCC TBFM SMEs, there was some very good progress made. There are still some larger discussions that need to be had to clearly define the Command Center's role in TBFM in the future, but it was a good meeting overall. Some technical issues were defined and future training and system customization support was laid out not only to help them support the NEC initiatives but other NAS support as well. During the week of Sept. 16, the first week of IDAC installations for ZTL ATCT was conducted. Ops Team members were at AGS and BHM as well as at ZTL to support the testing. The system was installed at AGS successfully and the Ops Team verified that the display and functionality of the IDST was acceptable utilizing Ops support. At BHM the physical installation of the equipment went well but unfortunately due to FTI issues related to the cable runs involved the functionality of the IDST did not perform in an acceptable manner. The Ops team along with Engineering Services and Program Office technical support worked over two days to remedy the problem but unfortunately the system was never able to schedule aircraft in an acceptable manner. Due to this, the team recommended to the facility not to utilize the system until the issues could be resolved. The Program Office will be working over the coming weeks to remedy the issue, and when the system is ready to be tested again, the Ops team will support the site to ensure proper operational use of the system can be achieved. The TBFM team Co-Leads traveled to CFS and presented a briefing on the first day during a new activity at CFS called Tech Talks. The briefing went over a number of topics to include the many components: TBFM, the TBFM Ops team role, and the current use of TBFM across the NAS. There were a number of good questions after the briefing and overall it seemed well received. As well as TBFM there were briefings that covered commercial space, remote towers, and DataComm. During the week of Sept. 23, the second week of IDAC installations at ZTL was conducted. Installations were scheduled at ATL and GSO, and Ops team personnel were onsite to support the activities. At GSO, the IDST equipment was installed and verified over the two days, and two SMEs were trained on the IDST functionality. At ATL, the IDST equipment was installed and the functionality was acceptable but there are a few outstanding installation items to be addressed relating to the default