A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/716610
SAFETY AND TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT AIRPORT CAPACI TY DECISION SUPPORT TOOL (ADEST): Kristen Laubach represents the membership as the Artic le 48 Representative for ADEST. Her report is below: Over the past month Airport Capacity Decision Support Tool (ADEST) has moved into a testing phase for SFO where we continue to find iss ues. Initially the weather and NOTAMS pages were not updating correctl y but this has been corrected. More concerns arose when ADEST continued to show a runway as open after a simulated closure of that runway had been entered into the pr ogram. In addition, ADEST calculated an Airport Arrival Rat e (AAR) for the closed runway. Programmers are working on correcting these issues. COLLABORATIVE DECISION MAKING (CDM): Kyle Andrews (ORD) is the NATCA Representative to the Surface Concept Team ( SCT). Mr. Andrews forwarded the information below for the membership : The Surface Concept Team did not have any scheduled meetings or telcons in July. On September 21 , the SCT has been scheduled to travel to Charlotte to engage with NASA on many of the con cepts involved with surface efficiency, with a focus on use of EOBT and surface metering. The FAA recently met with MSP Center towers to inform them of SCT Tasking 66 - Early - Call - For - Release. The test period is scheduled to start in early September. It is going to be evaluated after 30 days then after 60 days. NEXTGEN DISTANCE MEASURING EQUIPMENT (NG DME) PROGRAM : Samed Rizvi (PCT) is the NG DME National Representative. Mr. Rizvi forwarded the information below for the membership : Samed Rizvi met with L esly Samedy (Manager, ATO/PMO Enterprise Services) for a face - to - face int roduction at FAA headquarters. Mr. Rizvi participated in the weekly NextGen s tatus m eeting and Steering Engineering Workgroup telcons. Mr. Rizvi does not foresee any impact from NextG en DME on the contr oller workforce at the moment. Mr. Rizvi requested a briefing packet from Lesly Samedy containing a large - scale overview of the program and timelines. The PM has not been coopera tive in providing the briefing. Mr. Utley and Mr. Rizvi are working together to gain his cooperation. The following is a description of the program provided by the PMO: The FAA is transitioning the NAS to Performance Based Navigation (PBN) to enable aircraft to fly flexible point - to - point routes and parallel track s to support forecasted increases in air traffic and enplanements and to eliminate chokepoints and delays to improve En Route navigation efficiency. PBN allows aircraft to fly precise tracks closer together for more efficient use of the airspace, while red ucing noise, fuel cons umption, and carbon emissions. The transition to PBN is being enabled, to a large extent, by the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and its aviation augmentations, which are collectively referred to as Global Navigation Satellite Syst ems (GNSS). GNSS enables aircraft to fly Area Navigation (RNAV) and Required Navigation Performance (RNP) routes and procedures virtually an ywhere in all phases of flight. However, GNSS is vulnerable to outages caused by Radio Frequency Interference (R FI), both jamming and spoofing. Therefore a portion of the ground based Navaids will be retained to provide a PBN - capable resilient service to GNSS.