Is the NOTAM system broken and beyond repair?
Thread Starter
Is the NOTAM system broken and beyond repair?
KCPT - E11 - KALM. This is a route I fly sometimes. I made the mistake of going to the FAA.gov site and pulling the NOTAMs for the flight, including just a 10NM wide corridor(phone batt low). ONE HUNDRED AND ONE different NOTAMs! Every one of them regulatory, or FDC. Including one for Winnsboro, TX which is 130 miles - the other direction! All caps too, making readability pretty hard.
How many of these are actual service to the safety of the airman? I would say - maybe 8 of them.
Including this little gem: !SJT 09/302 E11 AD AP CLSD DLY SS-SR 1809260048-1809271241
So, I call the airport and ask; 'hey, are you closed after dark?' Why yes they are. The guy who's working on the fuel system destroyed their power to ALL the runway and taxi lights. Good to know, a useful NOTAM. But the other about 92? Absolute junk.
NOTAMs used to HELP the airman, now it's all boilerplate, and hard to dig out the value from the garbage. Wonder if it can be salvaged?
How many of these are actual service to the safety of the airman? I would say - maybe 8 of them.
Including this little gem: !SJT 09/302 E11 AD AP CLSD DLY SS-SR 1809260048-1809271241
So, I call the airport and ask; 'hey, are you closed after dark?' Why yes they are. The guy who's working on the fuel system destroyed their power to ALL the runway and taxi lights. Good to know, a useful NOTAM. But the other about 92? Absolute junk.
NOTAMs used to HELP the airman, now it's all boilerplate, and hard to dig out the value from the garbage. Wonder if it can be salvaged?
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Yes it is. At the hearing for the Air Canada incident at SFO, an NTSB member said the NOTAMS were garbage. The runway closure was on page 8 of 27 for that flight. I got over two pages with 20-30 NOTAMS per page about cranes operating in the airport area. I try to look for the ones that pertain to taxiways, runways, and departure and arrival procedures I plan to use. I ignore most of the rest, because I would run an hour late trying to read and understand the rest.
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The problem is how to sift the wheat from the chaff. If we get 4 pages, how to know if there isn't something valuable in the middle of page 4? And as noted, there were 27 pages for the A/C flight into SFO. I'm sure they got an electronic copy, but just like all of us, the list isn't categorized or prioritized. I would think runway closure at destination would be on page 1. My night closure was at the bottom of page 2. Would have been messy if I were approaching after dark, and I clicked the mic 5 times and nothing happens. Ruh-roh, my alternate was beyond the 10NM wide corridor I asked to cover for the NOTAM. Suppose I put the alternate in, it would have run to 130 or more!
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The NOTAM system is unbelievably cumbersome and does not support aviation safety in the real world. if you have to look through 27 pages to find what you want it does not support safety. I would think that a possible answer would lie in the charts themselves and particularly the electronic kind. The technology must be there to put a colored or distinctive mark at the appropriate spot on a chart, like displaced threshold, Glide-slope OTS, approach lights OTS etc, etc, to update the charts. As the NOTAM system bypasses the normal chart issuance date it would have to be a day by day thing. However with electronic updating, possibly as a paid service at first, the charts would contain, to the extent they can, the NOTAM information for that particular airport, NAV aid runway etc.
Even if it was just a symbol on the chart it would direct the airman to see what the actual NOTAM was instead of fishing through a stack. For those NOTAMS that do not lend themselves to a chart symbol, a narrative as is done now would be used. I think a program like this could greatly simplify things.
Even if it was just a symbol on the chart it would direct the airman to see what the actual NOTAM was instead of fishing through a stack. For those NOTAMS that do not lend themselves to a chart symbol, a narrative as is done now would be used. I think a program like this could greatly simplify things.
