A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/785247
WEEKLY UPDATE FROM FAA ATO COO TERI BRISTOL Points of NextGen Pride Hi everyone. Last week, our Program Management Organization (PMO) Vice President Kristen Bur nham and I visited Harris Corporation, one of the companies that are building systems to support our NextGen modernization. With a multi - year project with so many moving parts, it's important for us to see firsthand how things are coming along. I want to s hare with you some of the recent progress we've been making nationwide. Our work with the aviation community, through the NextGen Advisory Committee and the NextGen Integrated Working Group, as well as our close collaboration with our labor partners , has been instrumental to our success over these past several years. Through our teamwork, we issued the second NextGen Priorities Joint Implementation Plan this past October. The plan represents a sustained joint FAA - industry commitment to achieve concrete milestones on our four near - term NextGen priorities at specific locations by specific dates through 2019. We continue to increase the use of Performance Based Nav igation (PBN) operations. We've published most of the procedures involved in our Charlotte and Atlanta Metroplexes, and we're in the process of implementation in Southern California. We're looking ahead to optimizing PBN with Time Based Flow Management dec ision support tools, bringing us one step closer to the NextGen vision of trajectory - based operations. All of these efforts support our transition to an all - PBN NAS as detailed in our PBN NAS Navigation strategy , a 15 - year plan that we published this past fall. Because adjustments to flight paths are to the general public among the more noticeable NextGen changes, we've stepped up our engagement with local communities to make sure we hear the ir concerns and consider ways to address them. To advance surface data sharing, we've established agreements with air carriers to receive 11 surface data elements from them, which we can use to make surface operations more predictable and efficient. One of these elements is Earliest Off Block Time, or EOBT, which helps us to update our departure times so we can better model system demand. Delta and American A irlines are among the first to set up the capability to share their data with us in real time thro ugh the FAA's System Wide Information Management program. The more we can improve the predictability of aircraft movement on the surface, the more we can properly sequence flights to hit the slots in the overhead stream. These activities will be leveraged into our Terminal Flight Data Manager program, which we will start implementing at airports in 2019. In support of making Multiple Runway Operations more efficient, we've safely reduced wake separation standards at 14 TRACONs and 28 airports around the n ation, reducing aircraft fuel usage and emissions. We've deployed Data Communications departure clearance service (DCL) at 55 control towers, completing the project two and a half years ahead of schedule! Thus far, more than 22,000 air traffic operations per week are benefiting from this capability. Because of DCL use, we're seeing less taxi time by aircraft than would otherwise result because of bad weather. In 2019, we'll star t to deploy Data Comm in our en route control centers. We're developing the sof tware in ERAM and taking other preliminary steps now.