A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/633543
Senior Communications and Public Affairs Associate Sarah McCann : smccann@natcadc.org ; 202 - 220 - 9813 Multimedia Specialist Jordan Thielker : jthielker@natcadc.org ; 202 - 266 - 9875 Communications Specialist Sarah Zilonis : szilonis@natcadc.org ; 202 - 266 - 9844. WEEKLY MESSAGE FROM ATO COO TERI L. BRISTOL 2015 End - of - season Review Hi everyone. This past October, System Operations completed its 2015 End of Season Review (EOSR). It's an evaluation of our performance during the convective weather season that runs from Ap ril 1 through Sept 30. This is a more challenging time, with increased traffic and severe weather. We often have to employ more traffic management initiatives – ground stops and delays, Airspace Flow Programs, etc. – to keep things flowing as efficiently a s possible. As part of the EOSR, we held a two - day meeting with our customers. In fact, this was one of the most widely - attended EOSR's that we've ever had! We had nearly 300 attendees, including people representing domestic and international airlines, bus iness aviation, other members of the aviation industry, and air navigation service providers from Canada and the Dominican Republic (D.R). We especially welcome the D.R.'s engagement, as we pursue our Caribbean Initiative this year and work with our air na vigation partners there. Our customers gave us a lot of useful feedback. We talked about how many extra miles the customers have to fly when we issue mandatory reroutes during thunderstorms. We talked about ways to give them more rerouting options. One ide a was to employ more use of Integrated Collaborative Reroutes (ICR's) in 2016. When we issue an ICR, we tell the customer where they can't fly, but otherwise, the route they take is up to them. We're in a position now to use ICR's more often because we've figured out where and when they work better. For instance, our data shows that they work better in the middle part of country, but not so well on the east coast. We also discussed ways to improve our Collaborative Aviation Weather Statements (CAWS). These statements are issued to alert airspace users in real time about newly - identified adverse weather conditions, like a thunderstorm popping up. Once the CAWS is agreed upon, the National Weather Service will disseminate it through the web to all customers th at participate in our Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) process. Our customers asked us to provide more specific descriptions in the CAWS about the adverse weather we're seeing or expecting to see. We're also going to add more criteria to CAWS so that we 're issuing them in more relevant situations. To put it differently, we don't want to alert users about thunderstorms occurring in a part of the country that no one is flying over. Our customers complimented us on our issuing of ground delay proposals prio r to implementing the actual ground delays. In 2015, we issued proposals more than 60%