The Copperchase Briefing Terminal provides Pre-Flight Information Bulletin (PIB) Service and Flight Plan Filing for use by Occasional Fliers, Aircraft Operators (AO’s) and Air Traffic Services (ATS). The Copperchase Briefing Terminal provides the ‘tool set’ to allow an AO or ATS unit to provide and Manage a Briefing Service. This service requires the AO or ATS unit to provide access to a source of MET, NOTAM and Aviation charts, services such as the AFTN, the CABS service, SADIS and Artifax/Metfax.

Some of the facilities offered by the Copperchase Briefing Terminal are:

• Filing of Flight Plans (VFR or IFR) with assisted addressing option and IFPS mandatory equipment checks.
• Option provided to allow the generation of the Supplementary Information SPL, this SPL is not transmitted but is retained by the system for any subsequent search and rescue efforts.
• Automatic Hard Copy notification of IFPS Operational Reply for filed IFR Flight Plans.
• Automatic retrieval of filed plans, no need to retype on receipt of a REJ, simply retrieve the erroneous FPL and modify according to the hard copy of the ORM REJ.
• Access to worldwide MET actuals and Forecasts, subject to receipt of MET data.
• Self-maintenance of MET data with configurable retention periods.
• Access to worldwide NOTAM, subject to receipt of NOTAM data.
• Tools available for NOTAM End-of-Month Check List resolution and database maintenance.
• Access to Aviation Charts, subject to receipt of charting service.
• Bespoke Pre-Flight Information Bulletins based upon lists of ADEP, ADES and En-Route alternates
• Pre-Flight Information Bulletins based upon AO specific Routes or common City Pairs containing MET (Actual and Forecast), NOTAM and Aviation Charts.
• Ability to view, on screen the Pre-Flight Information Bulletins prior to FPL filing.
• Ability to view a Pre-Flight Information Bulletins for an ‘Ad Hoc’ route.
  

  Sample Route selection screen Click above for larger Image

Filing Flight Plans
The Briefing Terminal includes a simplified version of the Copperchase AFTN Message Editor. It allows the User to generate FPLs and supplementary FPLs, and send them to ATC staff for implementation. While this version of the Editor does not provide the same range of functionality as the full version, it retains the most useful features such as AFTN format verification and auto-generation of generic information.

Manual MET Requests
If certain Met (weather) data for a specific location is not available from the local database (Briefing Terminal), it may be requested manually from the International Databases (Brussel/Vienna) by SA, FC, or FT.

Once a request has been made, a message will be displayed informing the operator that the retrieval will take a few minutes and that the results will be automatically printed.