You may like to let AIS know that, as an ATC unit at a very busy regional airport handling everything from G/A to widebody commercial stuff, we access our notam information from a Scandinavian web site, purely because the NATS site is useless.
It's true that one can get notams from countless websites, official and unofficial. It works for enroute information, and for international airports, because (ICAO or no ICAO) a hypothetical plane could fly that route
from the UK and that makes the briefing wholly in accordance with the regs.
One problem is that ais.org.uk seems to be the only free site offering a narrow route briefing, and that is
key to reducing the amount of rubbish.
However, if you are an airport ATC unit then presumably you are interested only in your local area notams, in which case you would not be doing an NRB. This then differs from the requirement of a pilot who (if flying somewhere) should be using the NRB. Unless he's just bimbling. I wonder if anyone has analysed the % of busts due to bimbling v. A-B flights?
This might be seen as unfair competition by commercial briefing services because of their priveliged position
This is a useless excuse. NATS are responsible for safe and efficient airspace operation and have no business supporting unconnected and non-revenue-generating (for NATS) commercial information providers.
It's like that stupid ludicrous excuse handed out by the CAA, for why they generate those virtually unusable A4 approach charts (unusable because of the very small print, and no DA/MDA shown directly). They say (face to face, when asked at e.g. trade shows) that they don't want to compete with commercial providers. So, they play into the hands of Jeppesen and Aerad, whose products are then able to be priced at approximately (the annual sub, for European coverage only) the same amount as an Annual check for a single engine aircraft
The CAA could have spent the same amount of time producing A5 plates, same as the free ones which the Americans seem to have no problems producing, and which incidentally keep Jepp prices way down for US coverage
Taking NOTAM from a foreign state carries the risk of missing data.
I realise that is the standard disclaimer, Mike, but the reality must be that this is nonsense, for a hypothetical plane could have flown that route, and landed at that airport, following a
UK departure. In fact in the European context it isn't that unreal, since any jet/turboprop can fly just about any European route in one go, and most decent tourers can go 2/3 to the far ends of Europe (from the UK) on one tank.