A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/713778
OPERATIONAL CONTINGENCY & CONTINUITY OFFICE (OCCO): Tammy Norman (ZTL ) is the Article 48 Representative. Ms. Norman ' s report for this month is below. The OCCO is now under the System Operations Office: AJI - 1. Dave Foyle is our sponsor. The office will remain in Atla nta at least until April 2017. Sys Ops has a plan for the O CCO office to be run through the Command Center (ATCSCC). Site Surveys : The OCCO Technical Operations Team has almost completed validating r equirements on the west coast. The Southeast is completed, and we ' ll begin the northeast at the end of the month. Th e installation of requirements will begin shortly, and it will follow a waterfall d eveloped by the Decision Tool. This tool is an unbiased decision making process that looks at many factors to decide the priority of work: traffic count, facility traffic (% of NAS), number of tier 1 facilities, geographical r isks, and political influence. These additional requirements are to be reserved for contingency only. The RCE s or whatever shall be tagged and reserved, but these details have not been worked out yet. We 've never been down this road. In a local outage, can the facility get permission to us e the inventory/marked spares? We are meeting with NEO and LS technologies this week in D . C . to discuss these issues. This group is the Sys Ops Resiliency Team. We want to work closely with this group to design processes and define responsibilities. Things to come : Visiting centers for site surveys to validate requirements, we are getting a lot of the same questions. They want to know why we aren ' t doing c enter to TRACON requirements. A lot of facilities are going to divest some of their airspace to TRACONs. The OCCO has a 5 - phase plan, approved by the ATO Officers Group. The first phas e is center - to - center support. We can ' t get all of the funds to take care of the entire NAS at one time, and contingency plans will not be complete until the five phase s of work have been completed. Th e center to TRACON is Phase 2. We have started this phase. With these questions being asked, it shows that co ntingency plans are improving. We encourage all facilities to continue to press on with these improved Operational Contingency Plans (OCPs), and we will get to it. TRACON to TRACON (tower en route) will be the next phase. It is the OCCO ' s goal to quickly sustain service from the loss of a facili ty, operational and technical. As the OCCO manager Tony Jenkins says, " Our readiness did not degrade in one day, and we will not be able to fix it in a day. " There are many conversations we have purposely not had or are just beginning : · Phase 3 - 5, · International relationships, ·ATOP/ Oceans, ·Non CONUS, ·Leveraging other modal assets to help ATO, ·Leveraging military assets to assist, ·Maintaining controller and technician readiness, ·Real corporate integration of business continuity principles (resi lience, contingency and continuity), ·Modification of AMS principles to insure future requirements contain "do not harm" guidance to improve and not harm our system readiness, · Certain policy modifications and consolidations , · and many others. OCCO ' manag er states, " While we don't own the actual work, the OCCO was designed to facilitate and integrate corporate activity towards solutions. " Mr. Jenkins will retire the end of September, and OCCO w ill be getting a new manager. Mr. Jenkins has