NATCA Bookshelf

As the year winds down, our teams across the national airspace system are doing such a great job keeping our operation running smoothly during this busy holiday period. So much work goes into making air travel safe and easy for passengers. I want to give a special shout-out to our coworkers at the Air Traffic Control System Command Center. They are ground zero for a lot of the planning that begins several weeks in advance, when they begin to review airlines' schedules and make some educated predictions about what to expect with corporate and general aviation traffic. That information allows our traffic management teams to start building structured routes to handle demand. During much of the year, airlines can choose the arrival and departure procedures they want to fly. But during periods of high congestion like the holidays, the ATO has to manage the flow more tightly by assigning specific routes to airspace users so that we can handle the volume and maintain overall safety. This not only makes the operation more predictable for our air traffic controllers, but also for the flight operators, who can more accurately plan for fuel needs and remain confident that they can avoid unnecessary airborne holding, vectoring and delays. The Command Center also maximizes the use of the airspace that military installations release to us during the holidays, and plans strategically for weather events. In addition to harnessing our brainpower and talent, we have some additional tools at our disposal too. The NAS Operations Dashboard (NOD) gives us a common platform to look at alerts across the system, whether it's a delay at a specific airport or a row of planes backed up in the departure queue somewhere else. While we have always tracked those things, it's hard for any one person to continuously provide updates on everything we know to every stakeholder. NOD is a great integration instrument that we've been more broadly using in the last year. When the holiday stretch has passed, we still have work to do to measure performance and analyze how we can do better next time as we conduct reviews with other ATO players and with stakeholders. All of these activities are great demonstrations of our strategy for operational forecasting that we call PERTI: Plan, Execute, Review, Train and Improve. Those are good practices for the rest of us too. While the stakes aren't always as high as a busy holiday travel week, our other responsibilities can also benefit from excellent preparation and information gathering, collaboration with key stakeholders, and follow -up that allows us to learn from everything we do. Thanks again to everyone who is working the holidays, and those who helped us prepare for them. I'll talk to you again in 2018! Happy New Year! Teri L. Bristol
 ATO Chief Operating Officer

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