To the Capt discharge : reading relevant NOTAMs today becomes a challenge , and mising something among the garbage is easy.
Yesterday I made a VFR flight plan from Germany to Holland and the automatic NOTAM briefing I received for that route was 9 pages long that included all the security advices for Khartoum, Damascus , Baghdad FIR plus the Yemeni airspace situation, plus TACAN bearings unlocks ( whatever that is) in various military airbases I was not even flying close to ,and dozens of Crane erections with their relevant GPS coordinates.
Is it the same in the USA ? NOTAM everything to cover yourself ?
Yep, in the U.S. there is page after page of obscure NOTAMs written in cryptic 1930's teleprinter format. I've certainly been dispatched to an international airport that was notamed closed at my ETA. Or, should I say, the airport was open, maybe for helos and such, but there was no suitable runway open for landing a widebody. I had a sharp coworker, she took another look at the 40 plus pages of paperwork enroute and flagged the error which I had hours earlier signed off on.
It was a real gotcha in my opinion. A long term closure for construction on one of the two suitable runways coupled with an oddly worded paragraph about a two hour closure for rubber removal on alternate Thursdays on the other suitable runway. The two notices were separated by the customary many paragraphs of cranes, nonstandard signs and unusable navaid radials. Don't know how I missed it.
We were able to bump up the cruise speed and maintain high speed below 10,000 and things worked out with seconds to spare. As I took the aircraft and turned off the runway I could see the maintenance crew coming on at the other end.
I thought all airlines in the US were required to have a qualified dispatcher check the notams, so the dispatcher involved will be in trouble, not the captain. Unless he failed to read the printout!
Believe me, it's always the captain's fault as well. And I've learned not to write things up to try to prevent a reoccurrence.
The company turns the event report over to the feds and you might get a letter and maybe some 'non-punitive' extra training. And in at least one case I am familiar with, an ASAP safety report doesn't protect you because since you signed the flight plan, it was a willful violation. Maybe I'm getting paranoid and cynical but as time goes on, I put less and less into writing while at work.
Their latest incident last weekend had their VP of flight ops flying a passenger flt to a airport that had been notam'd closed months in advance without enough fuel to divert to a airport 70 miles away. This VP is said to be highly critical of crews who are involved in the slightest incident including firing a Captain in June because he initiated a ground evacuation after both flight attendants and airport fire fighters reported smoke in the aircraft.
Hopefully, the fired evac pilot will eventually get his job back, I think the Allegiant pilots are in that infamous thug union, the IBT. Since 1952, every Teamster president has been indicted on federal felony charges except the current leader, James Hoffa.
Hey, youse gotta problem wit dat?
