Here we are, thunderstorm season already...

 I'd ask what happened to winter, but I already know. It melted...

So what's happening in the wide world of ATC and writing? Same story, different day. No writing done of late, the FAA has finally succeeded in destroying my creative efforts thru massive fatigue. The FAA continues to grind away, we're testing (read periodic live tests) a new computer/radar display system. Someday, it will be an improvement. Right now, it's... Less than ideal...

Reasons for my initial dislike of the new system: It's buggy. It's awkward. It's a change.

It's buggy...
Two years overdue, and they still find problems that sometime cause aircraft data blocks (the tags we use to identify aircraft) to disappear. We've been briefed on more than a dozen "work arounds" to known problems, issues that range from inconvenient to downright dangerous. However, the political football has been tossed, some highly placed bureaucrats in the department of transportation face embarrassment if the new system isn't implemented NOW! Guess what wins when you put safety against a bureaucrats career...

It's awkward...
The new system was designed by a bunch of bureaucrats and engineers. None of whom had any real experience with air traffic control. Oh, they observed us working, saw how the old system ran, and from that, they designed something essentially from the ground up. As a result, a lot of effort went into features that the bureaucrats thought would be useful, for example, Automatic forwarding of holding delays to the national flow control center for data recording. Old system: Supervisor with a piece of paper writing down delay information and having a flow controller enter a delay report twice a day. New system sounds nice, no? Except, in order for the system to work, the controller working the traffic is now responsible for at least a half dozen data entries per aircraft put into holding that he didn't have to worry about before. I know, six data entries doesn't sound like much, except that in a holding environment, the controller generally is full-on focused on keeping the aircraft away from each other. I really don't want to take my eyes off the scope for even a moment, but soon I'll have to enter holding pattern data that was handled quite nicely by a bored supervisor with a pen and paper... Many other examples exist...

It's a change...
I've had 25 years of working on the current system, even though it's gone through several computer upgrades, the previous improvements left the way I work traffic pretty much unchanged. I know where a weather report is going to appear when I call one up, I know where to look to find the hot button to identify a radar sort box when a problem comes up... (Etc...) The design techs arranged things the way they think it should be, not based on how we think it should be. I really don't need 5 different ways to do one thing, each involving 5 or 6 steps, I want one way to do it in 2 steps. Sure, the techies think it's cool. Controllers don't do cool. We do safe. Over and over. Period.

As you can see, I'm on a bit of a rant. Someday, the new system will be a helpful improvement, when they get all the bugs out, when we streamline our procedures to get back to keeping our eyes on the radar screen. Probably after I retire... In the meantime, with thunderstorms building, it's going to be an ugly summer, because like it or not, we're probably going 24/7 on the new system in one week. See the light in the tunnel? It's not the exit.....

Clear skies, regardless...
Jim