All,

My apologies to everyone who enjoys reading this update with their morning coffee on Sundays. I got it out a little late this week due to not having cell service by the Lochsa River. I’m on the road all day tomorrow and back to work Tuesday.

Cascade Handoff Issues

Garret did some research on this for us so I wanted to pass along his findings to you all:

I did some digging (and filed an AIMS trouble ticket) on another handoff issue that Caleb and Jackson experienced this past week. FAST and Airspace are actively trying to figure out how to reduce/eliminate these but in the meantime, I learned a few things that might help everyone understand what is happening and how to fix it more easily when issues arise:

  1. Unless an altitude is entered on a VFR flight plan (e.g. VFR/125), ERAM by default processes it at 045. In that case, when a VFR target overflies Cascade airspace, the STARS computer on the Cascade side "keeps" the flight plan within the first approach sector (EUG or MFR) it passes through and won't process it to the next Cascade sector unless a handoff was accomplished.

  2. One method to alleviate this is to enter a specific VFR altitude into the flight plan so that it processes as expected.

  3. Another method, if a handoff to Cascade is flashing to the wrong sector, "E1E" for EUG or "E1R" for MFR, we can try to address the handoff directly to either one by entering "E1E CID" or "E1R CID" accordingly.

If anyone experiences an issue, simply writing down the date/time/callsign and sending it to me or Kevin Miller in Airspace will help immensely in trying to fix the issue going forward.

Fix Posting Bay Headers

Those new ones should be coming soon. I need to coordinate with Lee a little more when I get back.

Tracker for Sector 13

I got some great feedback from the area regarding this and it seems like if we choose to put a tracker in for Sector 13 we should do it in split mode on the VSCS. The conversation about how to do this is ongoing so let me know (if you haven’t already) if you have any feedback about it.

Let me know if you have any issues.

In Solidarity,


Drew