National Association of Air Traffic Specialists

Aviation Safety is Our Business

NAATS HEADQUARTERS EMAIL UPDATE

Number 69
June 1, 2001

The May 25 AOA Highlights contained the following paragraph:

8. IT'S ALL IN A DAY'S WORK: There is an article in the latest Intercom ("A Hair Raising Flight Assist to a Pilot Who Never Left the Ground") about an outstanding flight assist that showed how FAA facilities and the aviation community pulled together to prevent someone from flying who had no business being in the air for a couple of reasons, including the weather. 

In reading this, Ward Simpson, NAATS liaison and representative to the GA summit, said he didn't want to sound grudging, but on behalf of the flight service specialists around the country, he couldn't resist pointing out that every day, day in and day out, specialists routinely provide weather briefings to pilots that keep them from flying in dangerous conditions. Point well made. 

Flight service specialists are one of those segments of the FAA community that provides a great service to aviation and don't enough nearly credit for it.

Nice job, Ward.

The following is an update of OASIS from our National Representative Jeff Barnes. This will be a recurring article in the Update.

OASIS

The OASIS Program has moved forward with the installation of new software at SEA AFSS last night. The main features of the new software is improvements to the system that address issues raised during the Independent Operational Test and Evaluation Early Operational Assessment of the OASIS system in SEA that was conducted last September/October. The next scheduled software upgrade is set for September with more fixes aimed at addressing those problems.

A few bugs have been uncovered in SEA with the new software. These are in the area of Graphics Overlays and Charts. SEA has been in contact with Harris to get the problems resolved as quickly as possible.

Members of the OASIS Human Factors Team were involved in the testing of this upgrade at the FAA Tech Center in ACY last week. None of these problems were encountered then. This was also the first opportunity for Steve Hannah, the new Supcom representative to the Human Factors Team to see and familiarize himself with OASIS. Also, Tom Brister from AND AFSS was there to give AND its first exposure to OASIS.

I will be in St. Louis next week to demo OASIS and answer questions during the GA Summit. Several other members of the Human Factors Team will be there doing demos and answering questions when not involved with the meeting. For some reason OASIS was not included in the presentation schedule for the Summit, but there will be plenty of us there to talk about it during the meeting.

The following week the Human Factors Team will be meeting in St. Louis to continue work on problem descriptions and solutions and also to begin work on the OASIS installation waterfall. The only things that are set right now is SEA as the prototype site and AND as the Keysite scheduled for operations in June 2002.

In this week's meeting with our lobbyist it was decided to seek a legislative correction; we will let you know when the best bill is identified for this purpose. The letter writing campaign has been effective and we encourage you to continue your efforts to educate your representatives on our issues. AK Regional Director Guylan Roberts is scheduling two very important congressional meetings with Chairman Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens. I plan to attend both functions and our lobbyist will also be in Alaska during that timeframe (tentatively the last week of June). We will meet with as many members as possible during the trip.

Wally Pike

Walter W. Pike, President

This page was last updated on 1 June 2001