I agree, an area FIS service is not (and never should be) a replacement for pre-flight briefing and I would be alarmed if I / we noticed a trend towards that. It is however what it was intended for i.e. the provision of information pertinent to the conduct of a flight.
I would also agree that sorting the wheat from the chaff is still a problem with the comprehensive AIS brief. However pilots have the use of third party software often discussed here and the frequent use and familiarity of the narrow route brief should get you better results. Not just a more pertinent result but a better understanding of what the brief tells you. As I have said before one thing that pilots ain't and that is stupid! Lazy sometimes yes, but not stupid.
Vintage, we have finally got the better of the new briefing system. We daily remove the chaff and have greatly improved the way that we display the (manually) extracted data for the Lon FIR. I can say with some confidence that we should now have the details of all major NOTAMed activity available much faster, and more accurately than we did. All displayed on the non digital "half mil maps" in front of us! If maps and pins were good enough for Dowding in 1941 they are good enough for us!
