Procedural Reporting / High Frequency Radio Operator

The HF Radio Operator is a key source of valuable position information and clearance delivery serving many oceanic and remote FIRs in the world and often functions with only paper logs or an AFTN terminal as the only form of automation support. Their work is safety critical since they substitute for direct controller-pilot voice communication. Atom™ provides some specific and powerful automation tools to integrate the HF Radio Operator into the CNS/ATM system.

By building on the Advanced Flight Data Management (FDM) functions supporting Air Traffic Control, Atom™ provides the following additional features to HF Radio Operator:

• Checking of position reports’ fixes, times and levels as they are entered against current flight data allowing discrepancies to be detected immediately during the current radio contact with flight.

• Completed position reports immediately update flight database for controller use and/or can be sent via AFTN to local or adjacent facilities.

• Completed position reports can be automatically formatted into ICAO messages and automatically AFTN-addressed to adjacent facilities based on flight’s four-dimensional (4D) trajectory.

• Overdue listings for flight that have passed a required position without reporting it.

• Flight 4D trajectory boundary crossing used to remind HF operator to command frequency change.

• Flight 4D trajectories’ crossing into HF-only airspace so list of flights can be filtered to only those needing HF services and can be used for checking for valid Selcal code on receipt of original flight plan.

• Electronic log of all inbound and outbound messages for instant retrieval, review and re-sending of messages.

For each flight, Atom™’s 4D trajectories can be displayed on a situation display to further aid the Procedural HF Radio Operator

• Situation display used for visualization of flights and relationship to boundaries and HF radio frequency families in use.

• Situation display used to find nearby flights in VHF line-of-sight who can contact target flight if no HF contact.

• The HF Supervisor can use live system flight data to predict future operator workloads using tabular displays and use same information in the situation display in fast-time mode to visualize future traffic patterns and relation to operators’ sector loading.

Interfaces to other systems:

The Atom™ workstation for the HF operator can operate in two principal modes, tightly coupled and loosely coupled.

The HF operator workstation can operate tightly coupled as a workstation on the Atom™ local area network for use at the Oceanic/Procedural ACC Changes made by ATC are communicated to the HF operator workstation through a local area network, and the usual services to access the AFTN are used for external messages.

The loosely coupled mode provides the same services but using an AFTN connection to exchange ICAO flight and movement messages with ATC.

The Atom™ Advantage:

Atom™ FDP capabilities allows instant checking of flight position data against the latest ATC data for improved accuracy and safety and allows the HF operator to visualize the air traffic and see its dynamic relationship with adjacent airspaces.