A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/698751
The membership is strongly encouraged to continue reporting any instances of E RAM working incorrectly. This will help the Facility Tech Reps (FTRs) get issues identified and fixed as quickly as possible. Every time the software is updated, there is a possibility of unintended consequences, and we will see very large software changes in the nex t few years. Even though ERAM is fully deployed, we are still discovering issues that need to be fixed, and ways to impr ove the system for the users. The ERAM team has been asked to respond to several Corrective Ac tion Requests (CARs) recently. When the Eve nt Review Committee (ERC) determines that the response to an ATSAP issue needs a technical change, they have been asking us to determine what solution will work correctly with the current systems. This process has been producing good results that are suppo rted by the NUT. FLIGHT DATA INPUT OUTPUT (FDIO): Ron Shusterman (A90) is the FDIO Article 48 Representative. Also included in Mr. Shusterman's duties are Article 48 representation for the Electronic Flight Strip Transfer System (EFSTS). Mr. Shusterman fo rwarded the information below for the membership. Participated in telcons for FDIO and EFSTS. There are 15 facilities left to receive new FDIO keyboards in the near future. Keyboards are working fine with very minimal change from existing keyboards. New F DIO printers should be arriving at the tech center in January for six months of evaluation by NATCA and FAA. Software update to EFSTS will be ins talled at BNA and PHL in July. Both facilities are using new EFSTS Replacement Keypads (ERK) with no issues oth er than EFSTS s oftware needing to be updated. Phase two of the new ERK will be tested in September at MSP. INTEGRATED DISPLAY SYSTEM REPLACEMENT (IDS - R): Richie Smith (N90) leads NATCA's efforts on the IDS - R project as the Article 48 Repres entative. Below is Mr. Smith's report. On June 15th the next IDS replacement product officially became a program by achieving IARD (Investment Analysis Readiness Decision). This basically means that the project is approved for funding but is still years from deployment and faces many decisions on requirements, cost analysis, etc. The FAA is treating EIDS as a new program as opposed to it being the latest product under the heading of IDS Replacement. This decision may or may not be a problem to the future support of NIDS . An obvious example is that the position of Program Manager for EIDS is open for bidding and the IDSR (NIDS) PM is applying. If he is selected , who will run IDSR? Would that pers on run both separate projects? Only time will tell. The technical issues tha t terminated System Acceptance Testing on the SCT network have appeared in I90 ' s network. This caused an outage on June 18th that shut down the network for over 12 hours. Where as the program office and vendor know the outage was caused by " an IP storm " th at causes information packets to overwhelm the FTI lines, the answer as to why the packet transmissions increased to this level is presently unknown. The PO has doubled the bandwidth of some of the lines at I90 and the network is being closely monitored. The latest software built was distributed last week and no problems have been reported with it yet. There are over 90 " fixes " bundled in this release and this should get many facilities to a much more comfortable configuration. The next operating system wa s scheduled for testing in July but that date has been postponed with September seemingly being the new target.