All,

 

I hope everyone is having a good week.  I did a little revamping with the email.  Hope you like the giant NATCA logo and the fighters.  I might be getting the hang of this website finally.  Got a few things going on so this update might be longer than usual, so please do your best to stick with it all the way through.  Here goes…

 

QC Detail

The detail to work with Lee Kramer in QC is still open for another couple of days (Closing date is Feb 28th).  Make sure you get your name in if you are interested.

 

From CEDAR:

Employees selected for this assignment will provide assistance to the Support Manager for Quality Control. Operations permitting, duties will be assigned intermittently for a period to be determined by the Support Manager for QC.

 

Dawn’s Job — Training Specialist

Temporary NTE 1 year (may be extended)

Bid closes 3/6/2018

Link: https://www.usajobs.com/getjob/viewdetails/491379600

 

Schedule Movement

We will soon be bidding out April Warfel and Al Passero’s lines.  Hopefully as soon as Wednesday.  I expect this to cause quite a shuffle so please make sure you are checking the sheet and marking whether or not you are interested in the line.  I want to get this done as fast as possible so Angie has time to reflect it in PP11.  You can expect me to be hassling you if you don’t initial the sheet.

 

Metering

Ok so this is a big deal right now.  We recently had a joint team brief with the B area and TMU.  I am going to try to capture some of it here.  Frist of all, apparently during metering someone is “regularly” assigning M79+ to aircraft.  This claim was made by one person in the B area and I don’t believe it.  If for some reason it is true and it is you assigning M79+ during metering…STOP.  PLEASE STOP.

 

  • Route Key:  Route key everyone.  Get the route updated before you send them to the next sector.  I know you may have been told differently in the past, but that is no more.  Update all routes.  The only way this can negatively impact the meter program is if the new route puts the aircraft at BTG at a time later than their scheduled meter time.  This should almost never happen and TMU should be vigilant and correct it when it does.

 

  • Showing the whole delay:  We are still working on making this a reality.  This Wednesday I plan to run a test of it to see if there are any negatives and if I see none, I will be working to make it permanent.  In the meantime it might not be the worst idea to be informing pilots that in the next sector they will still be delayed 5 more minutes to help get them used to it.  Randy Vincent is also supposed to be getting with the airlines to let them know they will be metered through multiple sectors in ZSE.

 

  • Locked in Times Changing:  Apparently this is just something that might happen.  I have seen it happen where the time went up 3 minutes after we turned the aircraft back.  This should be rare but can be caused be a whole host of things.  The best thing to do if it happens is to hit the new time.  If you feel like it, you can call TMU and if they have a slot further up the list, they might be able to change it.  This is just something we are going to have to do deal with for now.  I am hoping that seeing the BTG time changes this.

 

  • Meter Delay vs Sequence Delay:  I have been working with metering for about the last 8 years and I had never heard of a sequence delay until last week.  I think a better explanation is coming from TMU at some point but the general idea is that aircraft can have a 2 minute delay with us and no delay in the B area.  I previously didn’t think that was possible.  If we have 2 then they have 5, right?  Well apparently not always.  We could potentially be seeing a delay that is intended to space the aircraft out as required for the HAWKZ arrival.  This was news to me and hopefully we will learn more about it in the future or even better, maybe it will stop being an issue when we see the whole BTG time.

 

Possible Bid for B Area

Just a heads up, the front office is kicking around the idea of opening up a bid for a D area person to go to the B area.  As of right now it is just an idea and it would be voluntary.  I’ll let you know if any of that changes.

 

Juniper Complex

We are currently having a good chat on Slack about how we should handle Juniper Hart clearances and what we should expect the B area to give us as the “controlling agency.”  Make sure you join up on that channel if you want your voice to be heard!  Click the link below that applies to you!

 

Legislative Class

Last week, Jackson Yang took two days of his personal time to go learn more about NATCA’s legislative involvement and how our lobbying efforts work.  I think it is awesome that he stepped up to volunteer for something like that and I wanted to shout him out for it.  Please let me know if you have any interest in anything NATCA offers as far as classes or any activism goes and I will get you whatever information you want.

 

Slack Invites

Lots of people joined last week!  Don’t forget to turn on notifications if you want to know what is going on in there.  Only the following people are left to join:

 

Mark Baden

Geoff Goodfellow

Eric Johnsen

Bill Kohler

Brett Lewis

Derek Myers

April Warfel

Carl Warfel

Jared Zautner

Jessica Randall

 

If your name is listed here, click the orange button below.  If your name is not here then you are already on slack and you can click the blue button to join the conversation. (In case you are viewing this on the website, these buttons are only visible on the email.)

 

To make sure you are in the right channel, click the multi colored hashtag (pound sign) in the top left and select the lowercase d to join our slack.  Then go to the top right and go to settings and turn on all notifications.  If you don’t turn them all on, you won’t get any.

 

In Solidarity,

 

Drew