A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/746805
speeds are not realistic at 10,000 feet. Representatives from the agency and Raytheon were on site to resolve this and other AT Coach issues and , while they provided some relief, more work will be required in reg ards to aircraft speed and simulated ILS approaches. A meeting held at PCT identified their primary software concerns moving forward with ORD (Operational Readiness Decision), some of which are coming in near - term builds. A group from FAA engineering spe nt a week on site to resolve surveillance problems with good results. C90 has confirmed a repeat SRM (Safety Risk Management) panel for November 8 and 9 to address changes in adaptation to alleviate nuisance conflict alerts. Mr. Ness will be spending extra time at the Tech Center in November to meet with cohorts and plan software related activities for the coming year. He will also be assisting our NATCA SMEs over the next two months as they brief legacy STARS facilities on the R4 "merge" software. T AMR Deployment Lead report , submitted by Scott Robillard (K90) The TAMR Program has been transitioning facilities for five years. It started with the 11 ARTS IIIE TRACONs and then moved to the 91 ARTS IIE facilities. During this time the 54 legacy sites had to be maintained. The entire project is called TAMR Phase 3. One main objective of the TAMR3 waterfall is to finally, after several decades of trying, bring the entire NAS under a single baseline for software and hardware. The benefit of achieving a single hardware and software baseline is cost associated with maintaining three different systems (STARS, ARTS III E , and ARTS II E ). With all terminal facilities operating on STARS , the agency can reduce software production costs, eliminate testing across multiple baselines, simplify deployment of hardware and software, and improve supportability. Eliminating equipment platforms removes the need to qualify multiple sets of hardware for a single purpose and it eliminates the need to maintain tech ops trainin g in parallel. Simply, you eliminate two - thirds of Tech Ops training and tech center testing by having all facilities on STARS. During the transition of the 11 ARTS IIIE and 37 ARTS IIE (48 total CARTS sites to date), facilities STARS software was changed significantly to provide the functionality required by facilities like N90, C90, and D10 , as well as ARTS IIE sites. These changes are so significant that NATCA has again partnered with the TAMR Program Office to bring a quality product to the field. Duri ng the last three months, the parties have worked with Raytheon, AJI, TSLE , and OSF to deploy at key sites the R4 Software Merge Build. This merge build will bring the 54 legacy STARS sites up onto NextGen software , which will provide new functionality that has been previously unavailable. The next step is to develop a waterfall to roll the software out nation wide. NATCA will be in each facility briefing the transition and providing solutions where problems develop or exist. In addition to transitioning the rem aining 54 ARTS IIE sites , NATCA , in concert with the TAMR PO , will continue to upgrade legacy STARS sites to G4 STARS. As we progress towards the Thanksgiving and Christmas moratorium, the STARS deployment activity takes a natural down turn in the number of facilities that are actively transitioning. Even with the slowdown, the TAMR team has transitioned BIS and CRW from ARTS IIE to STARS G4 ELITE and reached Initial Operating Capacity (IOC) at the