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Old 19th June 2010 | 09:08
  #9 (permalink)  
BEagle
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Joined: May 1999
: ATP+Mil
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From: Quite near 'An aerodrome somewhere in England'
It is frankly ridiculous in this day and age that the UK doesn't have an official graphic display of NOTAMs.

The abysmal NATS site is an utter pain to use; if you don't use one of your standard routes frequently enough for Big brother's liking, they delete it from the system.... Even when you do succeed in obtaining a list of NOTAMs, the detail is often not in a readily assimilated format.

The requirement needs to be user-defined, not something 'legal but useless' involving strings of lat/long values which people are supposed to plot out on a chart!

As a minimum, a CAA 1/2 mill chart of the entire UK FIR should be provided on-line, overlaid with all current NOTAMs (including a 'click to reveal detail' tab, a 'save to scratchpad' feature and an ability to print out the scratchpad). Even better if one could add pushpin waypoints to define a track, then specify the 'route width' within which NOTAM information is sought.

No doubt there'll be NATS-apologists along to say how good their system is, or to plead poverty, but the simple fact is that this is the 21st Century and that user-friendly graphic interfaces are the norm.

I'm sure that there are third-party applications which do this sort of thing; however, unless NATS provides an official system (or contracts the requirement to an official service provider), there will always be doubts about the accuracy of the information presented.
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