Narrative:

Yesterday I had my first experience dealing with a contaminated runway under our new performance system. It did not work well because of the lack of runway condition information.once we left the gate we were at the mercy of ATC to provide the information; but phl only wanted to give us braking action reports. Runway contamination was not reported on ATIS. When I pressed ATC to obtain runway 9L conditions they asked the next landing aircraft for a report! This was after sunset; by the way.during my phone briefing with dispatch we knew runway contamination was a likely issue and the dispatcher said 'good luck with that'. He said to 'look the runway over and stick a ruler out there and let me know the conditions and I will send you the performance data'. After takeoff I commented on my frustration with this new system on ACARS and he replied 'tell me about it; we are not impressed with the new way at all here'.a landing aircraft reported the runway 'wet' so we obtained wet data and departed (pretty dubious report as it turned out.)am I missing something about how this contaminated runway system works? How runway condition information is obtained? Aren't the airport authorities supposed to provide accurate up to date information to ATC; and for ATC to pass it along to us? Is this problem isolated to phl? Why isn't current runway condition data available directly to dispatch?

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: Widebody Airbus Captain reported he was unhappy with the new company procedure for contaminated runway computations.

Narrative: Yesterday I had my first experience dealing with a contaminated runway under our new performance system. It did not work well because of the lack of runway condition information.Once we left the gate we were at the mercy of ATC to provide the information; but PHL only wanted to give us braking action reports. Runway contamination was not reported on ATIS. When I pressed ATC to obtain Runway 9L conditions they asked the next landing aircraft for a report! This was after sunset; by the way.During my phone briefing with Dispatch we knew runway contamination was a likely issue and the dispatcher said 'good luck with that'. He said to 'look the runway over and stick a ruler out there and let me know the conditions and I will send you the performance data'. After takeoff I commented on my frustration with this new system on ACARS and he replied 'tell me about it; we are not impressed with the new way at all here'.A landing aircraft reported the runway 'wet' so we obtained WET data and departed (pretty dubious report as it turned out.)Am I missing something about how this contaminated runway system works? How runway condition information is obtained? Aren't the airport authorities supposed to provide accurate up to date information to ATC; and for ATC to pass it along to us? Is this problem isolated to PHL? Why isn't current runway condition data available directly to Dispatch?

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site 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.