A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/660202
Services. Lisa Bercher is now the TAMR Program Manager. Ms. Bercher came to TAMR from NIDS and has a long history of success within the Agency. She is a different personality tha n Mr. Yarnell and will bring a different style to the role. NATCA has a good history working with her and we believe that the TAMR p rogram will continue to succ eed at an unprecedented level. • Several facilities transitioned t o STARS since the last update. P CT (Potomac TRACON) completed IOC t o STARS since the last update. They are not yet on Continuous Operations. The next planned event for STARS is Tuesday, March 22 at 4am and they hope to achieve continuous o perations on this run. There are also three more ARTS IIE sites to transition as well: ACY (Atlantic City), CHA (Chattanooga) and GPT (Gulfport) are all now STARS facilities. • TAMR program is comprised of: o TAMR Phase 1 . Legacy STARS facilities and Tec hnical Refresh. Deals with software of existing STARS f acilities and upgrades at those facilities to either STARS G4 or STARS G4 Elite (Once known as simply STARS) 7 of 47 complete . o TAMR Phase 3 Segment 1. ARTS IIIE facilties. Originally there were 11 , th ere are now three. D10, D01, SDF, NCT, SCT, A80, M98 , an d T75 have all transitioned to STARS and the remaining three sites will transition to STARS are C9 0, PCT, and N90 by May of 2016. This was a monumental undertaking that many thought was not possible. Because of collaboration and NATCA's total immersion in the pr ogram we are making it happen. By the time of CFS only two will remain as PCT will have transitioned in Feb/Mar. (Once known as TAMR Phase 2) 9 of 11 completed IOC . o TAMR Phase 3 Segment 2 . ARTS IIE and IE sites. There were 98 and there are now 78. We have an extremely aggressive schedule over the next two years and the team has been transitioning these sites with few complications. This is a huge undertaking and the work that is going into it by all aspects of t he Agency is utterly enormous. We are up to this challenge. The deployment schedule looks like this: 3 in 2014, 10 in 2015, 28 in 2016 (6 already complete), 32 in 2017, 15 in 2018, 10 in 2019 = 98 facilities total. The biggest obstacle is aging infrastructure of 23 ASR - 8 rad ars that need to be d igitized. This is known as the Common Ter minal Digitizer (CTD) program. • The following are updates from the various Phases and Segments of STARS and other automation components: • Surveillance Update submitted by Joe Yannone - Region X o Removal of the "Terra Fix " at two r adars feeding C90: There are numerous false beacon targets generated at two radar feeds into C90 that cannot be eliminated other than implementing the Terra Fix R emoval change at those radars. These false targets are currently being masked by th e C90 CARTS system. STARS has a higher standard for radar performance compared to CARTS. OR9 and DPA are the two C90 - fed radars where the most amount of beaco n false targets are generated. Before work could commence, a range bias was found and corrected in the ORN radar, which corrected an issue with using this radar for FMA use. C90 evaluation validated that this radar fix worked and put out a change notice - effective 2/19/16 using the ORN as the primary feed for sin gle sensor FMA/PRM procedures. On 3/15 w e modified the OR9 radar to remove the terra fix and on 3/ 16 the DPA radar was modified. Initial