Narrative:

I came in and was working sectors on advanced technologies and oceanic procedures (atops). There were 5 oceanic tracks that night and heavy volume. I saw the area manager and flm there with a sme for atops. They are never there that late unless there was a problem with atops. I was told atops was on the verge of 'crashing' and don't take vsps (variable system parameter) in which the conflict probe detects a possible conflict between two aircraft within two hours. During my briefing; I was told we have been experiencing ads; cpdlc; and aidc issues such as erroneous reports by the aircrafts and two military planes that had their GPS off by one hour. Commercial radio was not sending position reports in the right format and atops was rejecting them and we had no aircraft messages. There were also numerous messages in the sector queue that made absolutely no sense. Even the sme has a hard time understanding why the system was acting the way it was. Flight data strips were printed as back up prior to a channel change and yielded the same result. When I took over the sector I was doing the normal operation of working out of the sector queue and taking and giving non-radar coordination. I noticed an abnormal amount of aircraft position reports overdue on ads and non-ads aircrafts which leads to increase work load. The inability to open aircrafts messages made everything that much harder and without aidc all non radar coordination with santa maria had to be done manually. [Towards the end of my shift] I had managed to work my entire message in the queue and told to take another sector from the south. After sectorization I had about 20 messages in my sector queue. As I was working the queue; I came upon an A340 with an out of conformance time. I looked over at my aircraft situation display and saw the A340 still in radar airspace and deleted the message. I did not know that during the initial coordination from radar; the controller at that time passed an estimate that was over an hour off to the previous controller before me. With all the erroneous messages; overdue position reports; out of conformance reports and atops on the verge of crashing; I though that was another case of a bad message. However; the A340 was where he reported to be and clean at that altitude even though his passed estimate was over an hour off. I believe had atops been functioning correctly; this would not have happened. Look into and investigate all out of conformance reports. The atops system has the propensity to almost crash and there is nothing we can do except do our best with a severely degraded system to control non radar traffic. Don't think we can fix that. We always have to work through any problem atops has.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: ZNY Controller reported Advanced Technologies and Oceanic Procedures (ATOPS) malfunctions which increased workload and contributed to an airspace violation.

Narrative: I came in and was working sectors on Advanced Technologies and Oceanic Procedures (ATOPS). There were 5 oceanic tracks that night and heavy volume. I saw the area manager and FLM there with a SME for ATOPS. They are never there that late unless there was a problem with ATOPS. I was told ATOPS was on the verge of 'crashing' and don't take VSPs (Variable System Parameter) in which the conflict probe detects a possible conflict between two aircraft within two hours. During my briefing; I was told we have been experiencing ADS; CPDLC; and AIDC issues such as erroneous reports by the aircrafts and two military planes that had their GPS off by one hour. Commercial Radio was not sending position reports in the right format and ATOPS was rejecting them and we had no aircraft messages. There were also numerous messages in the sector queue that made absolutely no sense. Even the SME has a hard time understanding why the system was acting the way it was. Flight data strips were printed as back up prior to a channel change and yielded the same result. When I took over the sector I was doing the normal operation of working out of the sector queue and taking and giving non-radar coordination. I noticed an abnormal amount of aircraft position reports overdue on ADS and non-ADS aircrafts which leads to increase work load. The inability to open aircrafts messages made everything that much harder and without AIDC all non radar coordination with Santa Maria had to be done manually. [Towards the end of my shift] I had managed to work my entire message in the queue and told to take another sector from the south. After sectorization I had about 20 messages in my sector queue. As I was working the queue; I came upon an A340 with an out of conformance time. I looked over at my aircraft situation display and saw the A340 still in radar airspace and deleted the message. I did not know that during the initial coordination from radar; the controller at that time passed an estimate that was over an hour off to the previous controller before me. With all the erroneous messages; overdue position reports; out of conformance reports and ATOPS on the verge of crashing; I though that was another case of a bad message. However; the A340 was where he reported to be and clean at that altitude even though his passed estimate was over an hour off. I believe had ATOPS been functioning correctly; this would not have happened. Look into and investigate all out of conformance reports. The ATOPS system has the propensity to almost crash and there is nothing we can do except do our best with a severely degraded system to control non radar traffic. Don't think we can fix that. We always have to work through any problem ATOPS has.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.