On Jul 7, 9:35 am, Dallas wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jul 2007 18:37:06 -0700, Bob Gardner wrote:
One more time...it is ICAO that dictates these things, not the FAA. The FAA
just conforms to ICAO standards.

Back in the days before solid state memory, when copper wires and teletype
machines ruled, transmission time and printing time were equal. Cutting
out three fourths of the characters, numbers and spaces reduced
transmission and printing time by three fourths. In those days, coding was
a brilliant idea.

Today, a TAF can be sent in a fraction of a second to a CRT or laser
printer that uses the same amount of time to print a page with one
character as it does to print a page of War and Peace.

The original reason for coding has long since disappeared.

But there are still some legacy systems out there that are being
supported.

The architecture evolved into a rather impressive collection of
dissimilar systems, custom protocols. A true living, breathing example
of the old phrase "the great thing about standards is that there's so
many to choose from" producing a rather hairy beast indeed.

Modernization will help to (among other things) address this, but it
can't happen instantaneously without horribly breaking operational
systems and procedures. Action did indeed need to occur a while ago
but there's no point harping on that at this point, given the time
machine isn't even in Beta yet

SWIM looks to be one part of the NAS Architecture that will facilitate
it getting the

http://nas-architecture.faa.gov/nas/Reference/documents/TR04008.doc

...Now, I'll answer my own question in light of your response that the ICAO
dictates these things.

Some where in China is a 20 year veteran pilot that would have to learn
that the new word for BR is mist.

--
Dallas

Just my personal take on it, FWIW (maybe more than you paid for it :P)

Regards,
Jon