A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/1182646
purpose of these visits will be to make sure that the system is explained to the supporting facilities and that any and all needs such as equipment and training are captured. During the week of Oct. 14, TBFM Ops team members travelled to the ZME to support the T2T activity at the facility. This functionality will allow for ZME IDAC towers to directly schedule departures into the adjacent ATL and CLT arrival systems. This T2T functionality has been utilized at a number of facilities and has been found to be a desired addition to allow both the IDAC towers and the associated Centers to fully utilize IDAC for their departures. Members of the Ops team were at MITRE to look at the LAX-DEN interoperability activity. This was an activity to look at a series of future capabilities like TSAS and Pathstretch and get an early look at how they may work together in the future. The idea is that by looking at these early, gaps in not only the technologies themselves but also other gaps in integration, could be identified and captured for future work. The NEC group travelled to both ZDC and ZTL to continue the follow-up work for improved metering for PHL initiative. Just like the previous weeks trip to ZJX, this was to work with the facilities to not only work on the future design, but also to ensure that the needs are captured and worked on as well. This will be a continuing effort of the NEC subgroup to visit facilities in the lead up to the implementation phases of the PHL TBFM system. The 4.8.4p1 system was evaluated at ZOB prior to national release. TBFM Ops team members were at ZOB to support this activity for the not only the Program Office, but most importantly the facility. As there were a series of fixes in the 4.8.4 system that needed to be packaged together, a software patch was created and distributed to be tested first at ZOB. Similar to tests of a full release, the system was tested first on the TBFM support string and after given concurrence from the facility, it was loaded on the operational string. Further testing did not reveal any major issues and ZOB agreed to leave the system on the operation. Following this a national release will be identified for the patch system. Portland TRACON is relocating from a location at the Terminal to a building at the base of the tower. TBFM equipment was installed at the new TRACON, and Ops team members travelled during this week to verify that the equipment was installed correctly and working as desired. Some issues initially found that had to do with FTI issues, pushed the install to the second day. After these issues were corrected, the team finished the verification of the system. During the week of Oct. 21, the NEC group traveled to Boston Center (ZBW) to work on both the T2T implementation and to continue the PHL work at the supporting facilities. The T2T work will be to support the scheduling of aircraft into adjacent facilities to support the NEC initiatives. The NEC work will be similar to the work conducted over the past month at ZJX, ZDC, and ZTL.