ADS Recognition of waypoints

[heywood u bleume]

With regard to North Atlantic operations I would like to check the truth of one particular piece of information that is being put out to us at our airline. (We are new to NAT operations). We are being told that the 5 character ARINC code for a LAT/LONG position, (i.e. the position 56N 020W coded in the FMS as 5620N), is not recognised by the ADS. Can any of you experienced operators out there who cross the Atlantic and use CPDLC/ADS confirm this is the case please?

Thanks

[Dan Winterland]

From my experience, they are. This is based on the fact that we didn't put any other info other than the 'quadrantal' position into the FMC and we never got any queries from the OCAs. This is based on the Honeywell FMC in a 744 and ACARS provided by ARINC.

[heywood u bleume]

Thanks DAN, that's pretty much wot I suspected. Most of the "information" that appears out of our Flight Ops Tech department is BS, so I'll pursue this one further now as they,ve got us creating waypoints and typing in the full LAT/LONG with all the attendant opportunity to cock it up. Needless to say we've already had violations.
Cheers,

[Jr. Airman]

We received a similar bit of info from the airline i work for too.

They had a little more information on it though. Turns out that the quadrantal format as entered into the Boeing FMS, is transmitted via ADS correctly.

However on our Airbuses we are required to punch in all the LATs and LONGs manually as when we use the quadrantal format, it isn't transmitted as a properly formatted ADS message (according to the ARINC spec). Causes some confusion on the ground equipment i believe.

[heywood u bleume]

OK, thanks that sounds plausible. Boeing being user friendly and Airbus being less so sounds familiar. Our SOPS do not differentiate between Boeing and Airbus however. The FMCs are all Honeywell I believe, but with different software for each of the 2 airframe manufacturers. THe ARINC databases you would imagine would be the samer however. Any other contributions, including aircraft type, would be much appreciated.
Cheers

[jtstream]

No problems on insertion of coordinates on Airbus aircraft either. Never had a complain by any of ARTCC's