A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/648546
RF Duals and Triples (both TF and RF) can be combined into 1 report to satisfy all of paragraph 5 - 9 - 7 of the 7110.65 (Air Traffic Control Handbook) . This f ull report would take approximately 18 months, saving 3 months of review coordination when compared to completing 2 separate reports. DCP still required before operations can be enabled (18 months) . o RNP AR is a subset of RNP EOR. They mentioned a possible mandate (more of a goal according to the new PBN NAS strategy) of requiring RNP AR and/or RF by 2021, which NBAA, possibly Delta and Regional operators would have a problem with due to e quipage especially in the East. United, SWA are carriers that are supp orting this. This has been the battle for the last few years as TF works for everybody and can be easily converted to RF legs later but does slow the p rogress to a PBN - centric world. Users will not equip if they don't have to or at least sooner than later. The FAA is supporting mixed equipage. The focus may need to go to an airport type mandate in stead of a system - wide mandate. Operational approval for RNP AR at most airports is below 50% and well below at a lot of them, which may be more important than the lateral path issue. This is because of cost of training and av ailability of approaches. You don't have to be RNP AR to use an RF leg but a lot of approaches that have RF legs are RNP AR, so procedures need to be developed to accommodate this to bridge t he gap between RF equipped capable and approved for RF (RNP AR). o SWA pushed hard to increase usage of EOR at DEN instead of a long range FAA plan of developing use of EOR everywhere, which will take too long so the waivers can be extended to other airports . They said it i s working extremely well there. Mr. Kelly pointed out that although it is working well, the controllers are will also be working very hard to put aircraft in a position to use RNP AR and the RF legs because of mixed equipage, which will ha ppen at other airports if they are set up to take advantage of it. The FAA wants to minimize waivers and make rule changes (long range plan). • National Procedure Assessment (NPA): There was discussion on what the FAA actually spends on maintaining procedu res and what the actual cost p er procedure is a big variable. Average cost per procedure does not necessarily reflect costs for any individual procedure as it depends on the type and co mplexity among other variables. In Fiscal Year 2015, the FAA spent ap proximately $41.2 million on procedure maintenance according to the FAA's Aeronautical Information Services (AJV - 5). Maintenance costs include reviewing procedure impact based on proposed obstacles, issuing Notice to Airmen (NOTAMs) as needed for procedure s as well as periodic, scheduled procedure review. This cost does not include flight inspection, which is approximately $15 million more. The FAA bears a significant cost for maintenance of procedures, so any reduction of unnecessary procedures would contr ibute a meaningful cost savings to the maintenance of the NAS. o AFS had an issue that circling approaches should be separated from lines of circling minimum because getting rid of just lines of minimum doesn't save any work, they are just lines that are ass oc iated with a circling approach. This skews the statistics that claim savings when lines of minimum are reduced. The circling approaches still need to be