Phil Roberts Esq
CAA Directorate of Airspace Policy
CAA House
45-59 Kingsway
London
WC2B 6TE
February 20, 2003
Re: UK AIS
Following last Thursday’s meeting at NATS, AOPA have a number of concerns.
· Most Airfields have not been displaying NOTAM information for self-briefing by pilots. Where anything is displayed it is not to any standard.
· There is no backup for when the AIS site fails and at the moment no time-frame for providing one. AIS do not have enough capacity to provide a telephone backup service that would approach the capacity of the web-based system.
· There is no provision for anyone without web access to obtain a written brief other than by asking the Duty Officer to fax a brief.
These issues will not be dealt with until the standardised one-button brief is available (expected April 2003) and has been made available for fax download, which will inevitably be at some later date.
We therefore request that the A1/A8 bulletins be made available as an interim measure until the following conditions are met:-
· The one-button download has been made available, has been properly trialled, and has gained general user acceptance.
· The standardised brief has also been made available for fax download, has been properly trialled, and has gained general user acceptance.
· At least one month's notice has been given to users of the cessation of the interim arrangement following the above.
We also request that the AI/A8 and its successor, the one-button brief, should be made available from a different server to ais.org.uk or should be mirrored on to other servers so that it would remain available to users in the event of a failure of the main server.
Pending provision of fax download facilities we ask that the A1/A8 (or the one button download when available and tested) should be available on request from the Duty Officer via fax or e-mail for callers who are unable to obtain satisfactory Web access.
These proposals would bring a number of important benefits:-
· A standardised brief would once more be available at aerodromes.
· A back-up would be provided in the event of further problems with ais.org.uk
· The AIS Duty Officer would have a standardised brief available pending the introduction of a fax download of the new one-button brief.
· Users who have stopped checking NOTAM because of a lack of confidence in the new system would start doing so again. They would be able to verify the accuracy of the new system by comparing it with the old.
· Those who prefer to use a standardised rather than an interactive brief could easily be encouraged to try the new one-button brief by means of links to the new briefs.
· When the A1/A8 bulletins are eventually withdrawn a link can be provided to automatically re-direct users to the new briefs.
In terms of cost this would be very cheap to implement:-
The A1/A8 are already being compiled so there would be no additional cost of compilation.
The files could be hosted on another web server (e.g. nats.co.uk) at very little cost.
I look forward to your response.
Yours sincerely
Michael Cross
AOPA UK