Watch Desk

Watch is the desk that keeps checking when you are not looking. You choose stations and routes, the server evaluates them against rules you set every few minutes, and every change it records lands on a timeline that you acknowledge once for every device you sign in on. The page states its own terms in the subtitle: "Server-recorded changes for your watched stations - NOTAM checks run about every 3 minutes, weather about every 5, and events are kept 30 days. Informational only - not dispatch monitoring." The ledger records only what the checks saw after a station was added; a fresh desk shows an empty ledger for hours, and a quiet timeline is never an all-clear.

Find your way around

The page is one column of bands, top to bottom, with the timeline and a tabbed rail side by side at the foot:

The figures in the masthead and on the station cards count the loaded page and say so ("of 50 loaded"); they are not a claim about the whole 30 days until you load them.

How to set up the desk

Until stations, rules and a profile are in place, a setup card stands in for the masthead and shows how many of the three steps are done.

1. Open Watch in the sidebar (or press Cmd+K (Ctrl+K on Windows) and type "Watch").
2. On Choose stations to watch, click Add stations. The station editor opens in place: search a station and click Add; a station already there reads On desk. The desk holds up to four. Click Done.
3. On Set what the server records, click Open rules. The status line already says "Critical and high NOTAM watch is on by default - add weather, wind and TAF rules if you want them". Writing a rule is the next section.
4. On Pick the aircraft you answer for, click Add a profile (or Manage profiles). The profile editor opens on this page and the desk keeps its scroll and filters.
5. Once all three read DONE, the masthead, station cards and profile band take the card's place.

How to write a rule

Every rule is built from pickers in a fixed vocabulary; the only free text is its name. What the editor prints under "This rule reads:" is exactly what the server evaluates - if that sentence is wrong, the rule is wrong.

1. In the rail, click Rules, then New rule.
2. Give it a Rule name - it is how fired events cite the rule.
3. Pick a Condition family: NOTAM, Weather, Forecast, Hazard advisory, TAF bust, Trend, Operation or Wind. The fields under it change with the family: a Subject group, Outcome, Tier floor and Schedule gate for a NOTAM; a Metric, Direction (BELOW or ABOVE), Your number and Unit for weather; Look ahead hours and Worst category at or below for a forecast window; a Source for a hazard advisory.
4. Set the Scope: STATIONS (up to ten, or none for every watched station) or ROUTE (the next section).
5. Add Active windows (UTC) if the rule should only count at certain hours - up to four, and a window may wrap midnight.
6. Choose the Event severity: INFO, HIGH or CRITICAL.
7. Read the This rule reads: line, then click Preview last 7 days. The preview replays the draft through the same evaluator over this browser's METAR archive and NOTAM history and prints each match with its stamp, the size of the bed it searched, rows it could not decode, and matches the rule's UTC windows would have held. Forecast, TAF bust, trend and hazard rules are declined by name because there is no on-device bed for them, and an empty bed says there was nothing to check, never that the rule would not fire.
8. Click Save rule. Save refuses with the reason when something is missing - a threshold you have not typed ("Enter your own threshold number - the app never suggests one"), a route not picked, or a combination outside the vocabulary.

Weather and wind thresholds are always your own numbers: the desk seeds none. Wind rules read the crosswind, gust or tailwind limit from the active aircraft profile and compare only the runway ends you select.

The rules panel also holds three shortcuts around the editor:

Each saved rule shows its severity word, its restatement, an on/off switch, Edit and a two-step Delete. The panel header says the rest: rules add rows and never quiet the baseline critical and high watch.

How to route a rule's deliveries

A new rule is timeline-only until you route it. Every recorded event reaches Notifications in the app regardless; the channels add to that.

1. In the rule editor, scroll to Also deliver to.
2. Tick any of In-app alerts, Phone push, Browser push, Immediate email and Daily digest:

3. Click Save rule. The rule's row in the rail now ends "Also sent to:" with the channels you chose.

Browser delivery has two settings of its own in Settings > Notifications under This browser: the tier, CRITICAL + HIGH or CRITICAL ONLY, and Quiet hours on this browser. Rule emails have Hold rule emails overnight. A browser push carries its own event, so opening it lands on that row here, with Acknowledge beside Open. More than three rule alerts in one server run become one summary per channel.

How to read and acknowledge events

A row is the station and the time the change occurred, the severity word on its chip (with a live dot while unacked), the title, then the kind of change, the source it was read from and how long ago the server recorded it. Acknowledging means "I have seen this": it is your own bookkeeping, synced across your devices, and it never hides the row or changes anything at the source.

1. Narrow the ledger with When (Since last look, Last 24 h or All 30 days, each with its count), Kind (All, NOTAMs, Weather), Severity (All, Critical, High, Info) and Unacked only. A filter narrows what is shown, never what exists - the rows a window hides are counted under the list with Show all 30 days to widen it.
2. Press J and K (or the arrow keys) to move the selection and Enter to open the selected row: the decoded facts sit above the raw excerpt they were read from, then the actions. A NOTAM row opens in the NOTAM board's detail drawer when you follow it.
3. Press A to acknowledge the selected row, or click Ack on the row or Acknowledge in its body. Ack with a note keeps a line that prints on the handover; Undo ack in the body withdraws it.
4. Click Ack visible (N) in the header to acknowledge every unacknowledged row the current filters show. Reset acks (N) withdraws the visible acknowledgements, notes included, after Confirm reset (N) on the button itself.
5. Click Load older at the foot to page further into the 30 days. Clicking a station card reads that station's own newest page, so a quiet fourth station never reads empty because three busy ones filled the page.

A row's chips are read from the source, never guessed: ACTIVE NOW or NOT ACTIVE from the NOTAM's D) schedule, SCHEDULE NOT DECODED - READ RAW when it could not be read (treat the NOTAM as in force), ACTIVE AT YOUR ETA on a route rule, and ACKED, TEAM ACKED, NOTE and MUTED UNTIL for what has happened since.

How to mute a station or a rule

A mute holds deliveries until a UTC instant; the timeline keeps recording underneath it.

1. Click a station card to select it, and the mute strip appears under the rail for that station. Each enabled rule row carries a compact strip of its own.
2. Pick 1 h, 3 h, 6 h, 12 h or 24 h, or type a UTC time as HH:MM and click Set - it resolves to the next time the clock reads it, up to 7 days out.
3. Click Unmute to lift it early.

The strip says what a mute does: "Holds phone and browser push, the escalation reminder and the in-app feed until then. Events are still recorded on this timeline, and emails keep their own schedule." Rows recorded while muted carry MUTED UNTIL, and the masthead adds a Muted cell. From any page, Cmd+K then ! offers Mute 3 h or Unmute for a station or a rule by name.

How to watch a route as one unit

A route unit is a flight folder or a roster duty watched as one thing: its departure, destination, alternates and monitored airports, plus its ETA, so a forecast-window rule can be anchored on the hours around arrival rather than on the clock.

1. In the rule editor, set Scope to ROUTE.
2. Under Route, choose from your open flight folders and the next six imported roster duties, and click Choose on one. A folder with no airports is refused at the source.
3. Finish the rule as usual. A Forecast rule on a route with an ETA reads "the N h around your ETA" in its restatement and is skipped once the whole window is behind the clock; a route with no ETA keeps the rolling window, and the restatement says so.

Saving a day in the flight brief, or adding an alternate there, rewrites the airport set and ETA on every rule scoped to that folder. The Ops Map has the shortest path: with a route plotted, click Watch this route in the route panel's Watch Desk block, confirm the listed rules (runway closed and aerodrome closed at critical, approach aid unserviceable at high, no weather number seeded), and the desk opens with them added as "Ops Map" rules; a route already watched says so and offers a jump here instead.

How to hand over

The Handover tab compiles the loaded rows - events, acknowledgements, notes and team acks - for whoever sits down next, or for you tomorrow.

1. In the rail, click Handover.
2. Pick the window: Since last look, Last 6 h, Last 12 h or Last 24 h. The line under the chips shows the stamp the window starts from and which browser recorded it.
3. Click Print report for the print flow, or Email report to me to send it to your account address.

The report is headed as informational, not a compliance record. If older events exist that are not loaded, the panel says so and asks you to use Load older first, rather than leaving them out silently.

Export CSV (N) and Export JSON (N) sit on the same panel and hand the filtered timeline to the browser to save - the same rows and the same notice in both, with team-ack columns when you are in an organisation.

How to put the desk on a wall

The watch wall is the Ops display's watch variant: your desk stations first, then the board's pinned stations, one card each, refreshing itself on a wall monitor.

1. In the page header, click Watch wall. It opens as a chromeless display with the station chips and + Add along the top and the UTC clock at the right.
2. Read the WATCH band at the head of each card. A breach is printed in the evaluator's own words with the rule's name ("gusts 30 kt vs your 25 kt figure - Gusts"); a quiet card says what was checked instead: "Within your 2 rules on this report", "No weather or wind rule covers this station - nothing checked", or "No decoded report to check your rules against". Unacked critical and high counts from the loaded timeline sit on the band too.
3. Use the pop-out control to send the wall to a second screen, and the close control to leave it.

The wall's foot states its stance: a highlight means your number was exceeded, never a status verdict, and weather and NOTAMs are reference only and may be incomplete - verify officially. There is no alarm audio.

How to screen airports against your aircraft

Screening is the desk's second view: each airport's published facts beside your aircraft's own figures, line by line, never a verdict.

1. On the View switch, click Screening. The chip carries the airport count and the profile in use.
2. Read the head panel in order: 1 Aircraft, the profile whose numbers stand beside every fact; 2 Today's numbers, an optional override of the landing and takeoff distance figures for this flight only; 3 Airports, up to eight, seeded from the desk or from a brief's link and added by search.
3. Read each airport's board: the airport-level lines (rescue category, fuel, approach aids), then one row per runway end. Each line reads within (the fact meets your number), exceeds (your number is larger than the fact allows) or unanswerable (a number or a fact is missing, so the line is never rounded up to a verdict).
4. Use Show to keep one kind of line with its count, Refresh to re-read NOTAMs and METARs for the board, and Print to send it to the print flow.

Nothing on the board is added up, ranked or recommended. Without a profile the board offers Add an aircraft profile and every line that needs a number reads unanswerable. A flight brief can open the board directly with its own airports, and ?view=screening on the page URL lands on it.

The guide and the tour

The rail's Guide tab holds the desk's own manual, "How the Watch Desk works", as chapters you open one at a time or with Open all; the first stays open until you click Got it. Take the tour at its head walks every band of the page in about four minutes, built for the desk's current state so no stop points at a band that is not there; Esc skips and Enter advances. The same tour is on the top bar's tour panel while you are on Watch, and under Settings > Help.

On iPhone and iPad

Watch is a Desk surface; the iOS app has no Watch tab. What the phone gets is the deliveries: a rule with Phone push ticked reaches the phone's alerts, respecting that device's quiet window, and every recorded event lands in the app's notification feed. Acknowledgements you make on the desk sync to the account, and the desk-station list is the same list the Overview and the phone's Home watch. See Notifications and widgets on iPhone for the phone side.

Troubleshooting

The timeline is empty after I added stations. That is expected for a while. The server records changes it sees after a station is added, so the ledger starts empty and fills as checks run; the quiet-ledger state names what was checked and when. It is not an all-clear.

A station card says "None on the loaded page". Three busy stations can fill the 50-row page. Click the card - the desk reads that station's own newest page - or click Load older.

A station says NOT ON DESK. It was removed but still holds rows from when it was watched. No checks run for it now; click Re-add to watch it again, or Ack its rows and the card clears.

New since last look reads 0 with a stamp that never moves. The Overview sets the last-look stamp; this page never advances it. Without any stamp the cell says no earlier look was recorded.

Save rule refuses. Read the reason under the button: a missing name, a threshold you have not typed, a route not chosen, or a combination the vocabulary does not hold. The app never suggests a number for you.

A push arrived but the desk says "That event is not in your ledger". Events are pruned after 30 days, or the event belongs to another account. The timeline below is your current ledger.

Where next

• Overview - the desk list the Watch shares and the last-look stamp it reads.
• NOTAMs - where a NOTAM row opens its full raw text and decode.
• Ops Map - Watch this route from a plotted route.
• Keyboard and command deck - the Watch scope behind Cmd+K and "!".