Thread drift!
The original post complained (quite rightly in my view) about pilots, including students, seeking to land at/overfly Conington during a notamed aerobatic competition when they had apparently no knowledge of the event.
So how hard was it on the two or three days of the competition to find this notam?
My own experience was that a narrow route search on the AIS site for an intended flight to Conington on 29 August showed the Notam as the SECOND ITEM on the search results - the Destination aerodrome info.
How hard is that to spot?
Admittedly, anyone seeking to transit or overfly the ATZ would have had to look a bit further down the search results, because their destination would not have been Conington, but for goodness' sake, a narrow route search would have shown a nav warning with the name "Peterborough Connington" in it, not just a series of lats and longs! That should have rung a bell for anyone who had bothered to plot their route on a chart!
However difficult some notams may be to decipher, and however irrelevant some may be (all those transponder code changes spring to mind) the point here is that a narrow route search of the AIS site (which takes a minute or so to input) would have yielded the information in readable form for anyone who took the trouble to read it.
So you can moan all you like about the inadequacies of the notam system in general (and I'd agree to a considerable extent) but it doesn't invalidate what the first poster was saying. People should not have turned up at Conington ignorant of the Notam. And sending students out on solo NAVEXs without apparently having checked Notams just doesn't bear thinking about. Sure, nobody fell out of the sky, but a student who is put into an unfamiliar situation suddenly has a lot more workload to cope with and can make errors as a result of inexperience. Usually good for the soul if nothing serious happens, but on occasion ....