Originally Posted by
anotherthing
Don't know about Swanwick i.e. LACC, but at TC (civvy side) we still ident to activate certain flight plans - not all departures have the facility of doing this automatically.
'Tis NAS wot does it. The facility is called Auto-DM (Departure Message). When an aircraft gets airborne NAS is monitoring through the radar input. It will see an unpaired squawk and if NAS has allocated the code and its within a pre-defined area of the airfield NAS expects the aircraft to depart from then NAS will Auto DM it and pair it up.
That will continue to be the case when we move to Swanwick in Nov (or at a later date tbc!),
Have faith! The Chief Engineer tells me everything is wonderful, marvellous and perfick
but with a new fangled comms set up (if it works)
Might find out early next month, just hope its a bit sunnier in Oslo this time.
BD
p.s. Pairing can be 'forced' by having an aircraft squawk ident. Swanwick has the ability to pair a particular track to a particular flight plan but thats only in the Swanwick system and not seen NATS wide as NAS pairings are.