A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/633543
we are working on solutions. Although incremental improvem ent has been seen since they initially transitioned to STARS in August of 2015, the continued issues have triggered a collaborative effort at duel paths. We will conduct refresher training for the controllers at SCT for a possible fall back to Common ARTS while we also continue to plan for the next software build (known as Drop 5) by Raytheon and the Tech Center. The controllers from SCT along with Management and OSF personnel will go to the Tech center for a "Playdate" where they look at the performance of the system and work to fix the software coding on the spot. It will then be tested at SCT and potentially turned on in mid to late February. If the target behavior does not substantially improve to a "suitable" level then we will trigger the fallback to CARTS. The majority of the issues at SCT can be traced to 4 Radars in the Los Angeles Basin that are physically located in bad locations. Although they are functioning mechanically at the highest level they have in years, they are simply located in an area where they point at buildings, walls, mountains and other obstacles. The STARS software must learn how to disregard the false and erroneous targets and present a clean picture to the controllers. • STARS/TAMR Phase 3 Segment 1 update submitted by Do ug Peterson - D10. o There are four facilities of the original 11 left to transition from Common ARTS to STARS, St Louis T75, Potomac PCT, Chicago C90 and New York N90. St Louis will start on Feb 1 and New York is scheduled to finish by mid June. We have regul ar meetings with each facility and so far have been meeting all benchmarks and expectations. New York will be the most logistically challenging as they report the least capacity to support the transition with local resources. We have already sent two NATCA members from other facilities to help them create training scenarios, and they have asked the program to bring in instructors to provide controller training. These are not things that we have needed to do at other facilities, but we expect to be able to m eet all requirements. o Southern California TRACON is the TAMR program's biggest hurdle right now. Representatives from NATCA and Agency management spent two separate weeks in San Diego this month in support of the facility's request to return to CARTS while STARS radar tracking performance is improved. The first week resulted in a report for Agency management that supported SCT concerns. The summary was "the team has validated there are recurring safety issues due to inaccurate radar tracking with the curren t state of the STARS automation platform at SCT." The second week was spent reviewing with the site an appropriate path forward, creating success criteria and reviewing the CARTS fallback plan, should that mitigation become necessary. o Safety Risk Managemen t Panels (SRMP) are routine and we normally conduct several every month, but two January panels were significant. One was triggered by the "safety issues" language of the SCT report referenced above. That panel is validating the safety risk of STARS R3aD4 software. The panel is not complete. The second significant SRMP was for a requirements change proposal that would extend the STARS system restart time from 1 minute to 6 minutes. This could have significant operational impact on controllers, and warrants a much broader discussion. That panel is also still underway. • STARS/TAMR Phase 3 Segment 2 Update submitted by Scott Robillard - K90.