Date: 201909
Aircraft: Commercial Fixed Wing
Operator: Air Carrier
Operating under: Part 121
Flight plan: IFR
Mission: Cargo / Freight / Delivery
Flight phase: Other all
Reporter organization: Air Carrier
Reporter function: Dispatcher
Reporter qualification: Dispatch Dispatcher
Human factors: Human-Machine Interface; Confusion; Communication Breakdown; Situational Awareness
Anomaly: Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Other / Unknown; Ground Event / Encounter Other / Unknown
Detector: Person Dispatch
When detected: In-flight
Contributing factors: Equipment / Tooling
Primary problem: Equipment / Tooling

Narrative: Saturday night while monitoring my flights I attempted to send an ACARS update to my flight after they received their clearance. The ACARS did not go through. I asked other dispatchers if they were experiencing ACARS comm issues. Initially it was just me and one other dispatcher that were having trouble with ACARS. I started my aircom server for backup but it seemed to be lagging also. The strange thing was that the mode of failure was not the same from aircraft to aircraft. Some aircraft could receive messages and respond to me and others received messages but I never received their message. During this partial outage I sent ACARS messages to the flights that the system would let me send to and told them we were experiencing a 'partial ACARS outage' and if [Dispatch] did not respond to ACARS in a timely manner to use SATCOM to contact the [Dispatcher]. For flights which I could not ACARS or that had not acknowledged my message about the outage I made positive contact with them by SATCOM to inform them of the situation. At the beginning of the event I informed supervisors of the possible outage and then I contacted our local IT/PC support person of the beginning of this event. After our local IT/PC began a call with IT support for alert messenger I was asked if I would speak with the Alert Messenger IT support and I said sure. The first action I was asked to do was to shut down and restart my [system] (I emphatically said no I would not shut down my [system] as it is part of my software used in my operational control of my part of the flight schedule). Then I was asked to sign in to another workstation and start another instance of [system] to see if that rectified my ACARS situation; I said I could do that. When I did sign in to [system] on the new workstation the problem persisted. At that point I stopped any trouble shooting with IT and began positive contacting my flights to let them know about the issue.From my side I do not know what the cause of the outage was; this is why I reported it to IT. With the hit or miss nature of flights that could and could not receive messages or send messages it sounds like a service provider outage that slipped through our notification system. The problem appears to me is that we dispatchers and IT have no positive feedback loop that tells us immediately what part of the system has failed. So IT starts to interfere with our operational control by asking dispatchers to troubleshoot items in software that was running fine before the problem is reported. This is not only true of ACARS outages but also seems to be true for WINDS outages. There does not seem to be any alarm bell that goes off to notify dispatchers when the NOTAM line has gone down. So in my humble opinion we need these feedback systems in place so that we know within 5 minutes that a primary system is down and we need to immediately go to our backup procedures.




Synopsis: Dispatcher reported ACARS was working intermittently.