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achievable without the professionalism, hard work, and dedication of the ZID and ZKC workforce, NATCA, SMEs, and training cadre. The latest network updates put in place by service provider SITA have proven successful in further enhancing the performance of en route CPDLC. These updates provide the controller almost instant feedback when the network cannot be successfully delivered and uplinked to a flight. Also, these changes provide the SITA network the ability to detect when an aircraft is flying towards the edge of signal coverage of the VDL ground station the aircraft currently has a connection with. The network will instruct the aircraft to handoff to a new downstream VDL ground station that can provide a better-quality signal to the flight. This will further increase the rate of successfully delivered uplink messages to participating flights. Because of these updates, over 98% of uplinked messages are successfully delivered to the flight deck within 15 seconds from the time it was sent by the controller. The error rate of unsuccessful uplinks caused by network or avionics issues are now less than 1%. The remaining percentage of unsuccessful uplinks are due to flight crew error. These human errors have also dropped below 1% and continue to see improvement as flight crews get more exposure and experience using the system. The DataComm program is fully engaged in workforce training activities at the next five facilities in the deployment waterfall: ZDC, ZTL, ZNY, ZBW, and ZJX. These facilities are scheduled to start site testing mid-winter to early spring next year. The initial services rollout is planned to continue through 2020 and completing in mid-2021 with ZSE. Crucial updates to avionics software are tracked to provide additional improvement to CPDLC performance in 2020. Rockwell Collins has successfully conducted the first round of flight tests of its "CORE 16" avionics update for Boeing non-Southwest 737 fleets. Core 16 is planned to complete certification and be available for installation by operators on March 1, 2020. Honeywell has completed the certification process for their "523" update developed for the Southwest 737 fleet. Southwest has begun installing the 523 update on a group of 60 aircraft for a trial period to assess the CPDLC performance of this software update. A decision to continue installing the update on the rest of the fleet was made at the end of November. Additional avionics software updates for Airbus A321/A350/A330 fleets and Boeing 777/787 fleets are scheduled for certification early next year. These updates will help increase the number of aircraft participating in en route CPDLC operations. The DataComm program continues to work with avionics manufacturers to develop software updates that will allow General Aviation, air taxi, fractional ownership operations, and other military fleets to return back to en route CPDLC operations. These fleets were removed from CPDLC en route operations due to poor performing avionics software that caused the aircraft to make connections to non- preferred media and interrupt the smooth transition between ground station connections. The percentage of unsuccessful uplink transactions for these aircraft was much higher than other fleets.

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