1. Crap and unwieldy user interface which is not intuitive or forgiving of errors.
Which one? Swanwick? or any other of the dozen or so units its been stretched to manage? Have you suggested improvements? Offered suggestions?
2. Inability to cope with any routes which are out of the ordinary. Everything has to be 'adapted' and I don't believe it has the capacity to cover every possible scenario which we see on a regular basis. Hence people spend an inordinate amount of time frigging the system and trying to get something meaningful out for controllers.
We have tried to standardise routes to standardise strip outfall. Flight plan 'A' will produce strips 'B - F' at units 'G - k'. Its because our airspace is so complex. If the routes don't suit then do something about it via ops.
3. Extremely poor processing of direct routes, unable to provide the ATCO with anything meaningful except 7 or 8 irrelevant strips. Other FDPs can cope with airspace entry/exit which are not through recognised COPs. NAS apparently can't.
Agreed
4. Defaults to 'preferred routes' between city pairs sometimes regardless of what the aircraft has actually filed. There is now a dependence placed on someone inputting the fact that the filed and processed routes differ. And if it is missed ...... ??
Agreed and defined by ops reps. Again, take it up with them and we will fix it!
5. Far too many simple input errors seem to cause it to crash once a year or so. A decent system would have protections which provide a caution to the user before allowing them to make a critical error. Or simply just not allow them to do it.
Which decent system? SACTA? Eurocat?
6. Still unable to process PAC, REV and MAC messages thus involving staff in having to undergo co-ordination telephone calls everytime something changes after the ACT has been sent.
NAS is being replaced so management (and the lackies really are a pain here) will not spend money on it. PAC, MAC and REV and half done in NAS so, again, MAKE SOME NOISE!!
7. As already mentioned, extremely poor memory retention which means it needs to be shut down once a week .. is it running on a Sinclair Spectrum ZX81 or something ??
Shut down once a week due memory? I don't think so. Try for testing as 'management' will not invest in a proper test bed (actually they may now be doing this at the CTC).
My impression is that those who have worked tirelessy and thanklessly on the NAS 'empire' over the years now see a real threat to their domain and the realisation that their specialist knowledge and skills will soon become redundant. As such, they are extremely keen to champion NAS, some even propose developing it as part of any future system
Maybe so in some quarters. Lets see what the new system can do. iTEC (there isen't one) stands for interoperability through european cooperation. Does that sound like an FDP system to you. Its SACTA with tools - maybe tools like IFACTS! SACTA cannot cope with the London FIR - period!
I strongly agree the work done now and in the past has been done as well as it possibly can by a very skilled staff group, but one day we have to wake up to the fact that the core processing philosophy which NAS has was designed in an age which did not have any of the high traffic and complexity levels which we experience today. Sure, we have continuous tinkering with the system to add on bits and pieces, but that's not the same as providing a system which has it more or less right as its basic configuration. It's inflexible, it's not easy to use, and does not provide a simple or graphic interface capability.
So get involved and do something about it. Is there a thread developing here? Most ATCO's just do the job and go home.
Seeing some of the other systems out there and what they can do in simple mouse clicks or typed instructions, I for one won't shed a tear when the NAS system is thrown out to the Science Museum
Which ones? Do tell. Have you seen them actually working in a complex ATC environment like ours? No! didn't think so.
COP's out of the blue are illegal. Defined COP's are required for OLDI processing, even the IAA should know that!