All,
Hopefully everyone is having a good week. Lots going on right now. I would encourage you to come talk to me if you have any questions about anything you think you might have heard or want to know about. Be careful not to speculate about things or buy into the rumor mill. Please come talk to me if you have any questions or concerns. Anyway, here’s the update!
ZLC LOA
We are in the process of putting the finishing touches on some minor changes to the ZLC LOA. This process was started back in January and is just now seeing some resolution. ZLC is trying to make the flash through doable for climbers and descenders. Initially I wanted to just do away with the AIT altogether because automated point outs render it obsolete but they want to keep it for whatever reason and it is hard to make the argument that we should take it away as a tool. We should also be getting control from ZLC41 on RDM landers. Not sure when this will take effect but I will share that info when I have it.
Leave Requests prior to posting
So Angie usually has the schedule done by the Tuesday before posting. Leave requests made between her finishing it and it publishing may fall between the cracks. This is always something that we can fix after the fact but it would help streamline things a bit if you send a quick text/email to me or Angie if you put in a leave request between Tuesday and Sunday on publishing weeks. Again, not huge deal, but it would help us to make sure the right moves are made.
LMT Cancellations
We are currently looking into the possibility of using the radar for cancellations at LMT. By that I mean we would wait until the aircraft indicates 4100ft and over the runway then we would consider that a cancellation. I have some ambivalence towards this idea. In some ways it would make our job easier but I do have safety concerns due to the way LMT handles the traffic at times.
A situation that would concern me is when we coordinate a full stop but only the lead lands and the dash 2 goes missed. Tower would have to be very quick to let us know about that. This may be an “abnormal” situation but it does happen often enough that it is worth being concerned over. I am sure there are numerous other wacky things that could happen that would be concerning if this were in place.
Let me know your thoughts on this. It is already done at SLE and RDM but I see those airports as having a very different traffic flow.
ARINC Frequencies
Last week our ARINC frequencies were updated to get rid of 10057 and 2869. This caused me to do a little research on how all that is determined and I think I know less now than I did when I started looking into it. However, it seems like in a perfect world we wouldn’t be assigning frequencies at all. There is a VHF network that a/c should be checking on to for frequency assignment prior to passing boundary with ZOA Oceanic. That way when we say “frequency change approved” they already know where to go. The thing is, we can’t assign that VHF frequency at the boundary because the aircraft might be out of range by then. So instead, we “assign” the HF frequency. Anyway, that’s all I know about that. Maybe someday we can stop having to tell a/c the HF frequencies. But until then, here are the new ones (also posted on sector 14/15):
0500Z - 1400Z: 5547/6673
1400Z - 1700Z: 5547/11282
1700Z - 0500Z: 11282/5547
ERIDs has one of them listed as 11281 which is wrong. Still working on getting that corrected.
2019 MOUs
Alex and Derek and I are meeting with mgmt today to discuss these. I am unclear as to what caused such a long delay on these. Hopefully we will be able to pass along more information after our meeting tomorrow.
That’s it for now. I just want to stress again to you guys that I would really appreciate it if you would bring any concerns/complaints/rumors directly to me. If I don’t know what people are whining about, I can’t fix it. Or at least try to fix it.
HAWKZ Routing Changes
Click here to see the proposed routing.
In Solidarity,
Drew