A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/880046
The Working Group is also doing a safety ri sk assessment of Runway Safety category and sub - categories, will confirm Runway Safety risk priority, and identify mitigation measures The Action Plan will be presented at the 2017 Global Runway Safety Symposium in Lima in November for endorsement. The p urpose of the Action Plan is to strengthen runway safety initiatives at a global level. The Runway Safety Action Plan Working Group will make recommendations to the GASP Study Group to assist the development of the 2020 - 2022 editions as well as develop new Runway Safety Action Plan. WEATHER Matt Tucker (ZTL) is NATCA's Article 114 Representative for Weather. His update for the membership is below. NEXTGEN Weather Processor (NWP) and Common Support Services – Weather (CSS - WX) Both systems are moving f orward toward system integration at the Tech Center this fall. The schedule for NWP has slipped some for the testing, as there has been a decision to use new Dell servers and try to avoid having to come back later and update the Tech Center system. When th e Tech Center has both systems installed they will also have a large number of Aviation Weather displays (AWD), which will finally have live weather feeds from both systems. This will enable more testing on the human factors design of the AWD, currently wh en the AWD is interacted with there is not live data so placeholders are presented and this does not provide enough information for true feedback on the system. Both of these systems require a great deal of bandwidth due to the large size and amount of w eather files that will be distributed by the system. The program office is looking at ways to save bandwidth. Some of the ides are limiting the amount of airspace a TRACON will be able to display the ¼ KM resolution high update rate weather mosaic. This pr oduct updates every 25 seconds and we are looking at limiting the product to each TRACON to a 30 - mile boundary around the TRACON airspace. In addition to the TRACON concerns is the large full CONUS mosaics that have a 0 - 8 hour forecast as part of the produ ct. The current update rate is 5minutes for the product but in reality, the 2 - 8 hour portion only updates every 15 minutes. Also, the product has a 1KM resolution so it is being looked at to change the 2 - 8 forecast to a 2KM resolution. So far looking at this solution the impact should be minimal but unt il we have full integration of the system it is hard to tell. A testing TIM is scheduled for the last week of September to lock down how testing will be done for CSS - WX as this system will go to key site testing first next summer. The key sites at ZTL, ZLC , ZOA, A80 and associated towers and S56 with SLC tower. Ribbon Displays for wind shear and Microburst. (RBDT) The agency has just started talking about replacing the RBDT's that have been in towers since the introduction of Terminal Doppler Radars (TD WR) in the mid 90's. The current displays are plasma based and have character limitations due to the original design. The displays are failing at a high rate and were not included in the NWP program for