A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/880046
There has been discussion of amending the FSSC charter. No path forward has been agreed to. Tech Ops would like to increase their level of participation in the process. NEXTGEN Kevin McLaughlin (SCT) is the National NextGen Representative for NATCA. His report to the membership is below. NextGen Oceanic Meteorological Initiatives At 02:14 UTC on June 1, 2009, Air France flight 447, an Airbus A330 - 203 wide body jet carrying 228 passengers, disappeared over the equatorial Atlantic Ocean. The plane departed Rio de Janeiro (SBGL) around 22:00 UTC en route to an expected arrival at 09 :15 UTC in Paris (LFPG). An investigation was conducted by France's NTSB - counterpart agency, the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA). The BEA final report, released at a news conference on July 5, 2012, concluded that the air craft crashed after inconsistencies between the airspeed measurements – likely due to the aircraft ' s pitot tubes being obstructed by ice crystals following a convective cloud top encounter - caused the autopilot to disconnect, after wh ich the crew acted incorrectly and ultimately caused the aircraft to enter an aerodynamic stall from which it did not recover. In the years following the accident , a great deal of resources have been directed to examining how the " Swiss cheese" accident theory acted in this case and one significant field of this research has been the weather aspects of the crash. AFR447 departed controlled flight while flying through a series of large Inter - Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) thunderstorms. While ot her flights that night were able to safely navigate the same convective system, the research has demonstrated the limitations of cockpit weather radar and highlighted the need for better strategic weather avoidance resources for oceanic flights. Aviation users operating within oceanic and remote regions have limited access to high - resolution (temporal and spatial) weather products that depict the current and future locations of deep convection and turbulence. NextGen Weather, working with the scientists a t National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), has developed weather products related to the oceanic/remote occurrence of deep convection. Global ensemble forecasts are being utilized to provide probabilistic guidance of convective storm hazards for l ong term flight planning purposes as needed for transoceanic flights (24 - 36 hr.). The Oceanic Convection Diagnosis and Nowcasting system is being developed to detect and forecast deep convection using satellite - based methodologies, global lightning data , and mathematical model results. The FAA Weather Technology in the Cockpit (WTIC) Program is assessing two products, the Cloud Top Height (CTH) and the Convective Diagnosis Oceanic (CDO), for cockpit display. The FAA WTIC Remote Oceanic Meteorology Inform ation Operational (ROMIO) Program is working to analyze oceanic aviation inefficiencies in current or future NextGen operations caused by gaps in either the available meteorological information or in the technology utilized in the cockpit. This effort has the purpose of implementing an operational demonstration to uplink convective weather products into the cockpit of U . S . airlines for the purpose of analyzing operational gaps. In late FY2016, the WTIC ROMIO effort began the execution of a Three - Phase Op erational Plan. Phase 1 will implement the Plan from product creation to uplink onto a tablet based EFB. This includes all efforts from pilot training to communication links to the appearance of the EFB display to the collection of pilot feedback. Beginnin g in 2018, Phase 2 will commence the operational