Hi Bookworm
If you look at my post in this forum of 14 Oct at 15:24 you will see that MATS supports Rustle's point. I am told that the wording is taken verbatim from ICAO Annex 15
It is a difficult issue and there are a number of ways of approaching it.
Your suggestion that everything should go in and filtering should be used at the point of delivery is persuasive, however it goes against MATS and ICAO.
It could equally be argued that facilities for loading and unloading the aircraft are a matter for the airline's local agent and should not be the subject of a worldwide broadcast. What if, for example, the bus drivers are on a work to rule or equipment is out of service resulting in delays in getting passengers to or from remote stands. Where should the line be drawn?
The underlying problem is that NOTAM are a quick and easy way of getting the information to a very wide address list and so are used even when not appropriate.
DVLA hold the address of every vehicle owner in the UK but it would not be appropriate to send a recall notice on a Ford Fiesta to the whole address list, you need to have more precise targetting.
If BAA want to tell all airlines using LGW that a stand is out of service there are much more targetted ways of doing it but they require more thought and a little more work. The same applies to the CAA wanting to warn owners of certain Russian registered aircraft that their C of A may not be valid for international use.
These are really matters for DAP. I know they have a view that things are being notammed that should not be, so we may see some guidance being issued.
I recognise that if MATS were strictly applied then alternative communications methods (e.g. new address lists) might be required so that users could subscribe to information that may be of operational significance to them but which falls outside Annex 15's definition of what should be a NOTAM. It would of course be useful to have the information presented using the NOTAM message format so that existing database systems could cope with it.
I am not trying to be dogmatic, there are many valid arguments on all sides and there is no "right" answer.
Mike