Notams down?

FF is giving me NOTAMS; FAA web site (NOTAMS) is unresponsive. I'm about to file, so I'll see if it has any impact.

Follow-up: FF is warning the updates aren't being made. Destination airport phone's not connecting. Going shopping instead
 
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midwestpa24 said:
I can tell you, the NOTAM system from a technological standpoint has been getting modernized over the last 10 years or so. As late as 2012, we as an airport still had to pick up the phone and call FSS to issue and cancel NOTAMs. It could take 30+ minutes before that NOTAM would be validated and transmitted. Since then, the process has been updated where we can now log-in directly over the internet and issue the NOTAMs. The latency between submission and distribution is now seconds, where it was minutes or longer.
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So you’re saying it would be easier for a hacker to access the database?
 
MauleSkinner said:
So you’re saying it would be easier for a hacker to access the database?
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I can't speak to the security measures the FAA has in place, because I simply don't know, but yes now that it is connected to the internet I would assume a motivated hacker would be able to attempt it.
 
Sundancer said:
... but the NOTAM system is a gross failure even when it's working - it elevates the trivial to the essential, and so obscures the important info. As many here have said, it's (mostly) a CYA system for the FAA, and a real danger to aviation
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(emphasis added)
You know, that right there could be a quick way to at least band-aid the thing: Some sort of automatic prioritization. RWY CLSD/ILS INOP would obviously be a higher priority than non-standard signage or the infamous tower lights inop. As with anything automated, it could lead to more problems, but I don't know how much worse it can be than the current firehose of UPPRCSE USLSS TXT. I'm a lousy programmer, but even I could code something to do that in an afternoon or so.
 
Update 5 on the FAA's Twitter site is saying that the ground stop has been lifted. Jet traffic over my neighborhood sounds like it is back to normal.
 
midwestpa24 said:
I can tell you, the NOTAM system from a technological standpoint has been getting modernized over the last 10 years or so. As late as 2012, we as an airport still had to pick up the phone and call FSS to issue and cancel NOTAMs. It could take 30+ minutes before that NOTAM would be validated and transmitted. Since then, the process has been updated where we can now log-in directly over the internet and issue the NOTAMs. The latency between submission and distribution is now seconds, where it was minutes or longer.

That being said, the problem with the NOTAM system is the information that is required. The NOTAM system has become the CYA for the FAA, the pages of fine print at the end of a contract, so everyone can wash their hands and say, well the pilot had the information available to them. The FAA requires airports to do the same, any deviation from the standard must be reported via NOTAM. A sign unlit, NOTAM it. A rut in the grass next to the taxiway, NOTAM it. Windsock is ripped, NOTAM it. Combined with the tower unlit NOTAMs, ambiguous airspace NOTAMs, and ATC NOTAMs, it makes for a system full of garbage that pilots are expected to pick through to find the gold. Just landed on a closed runway? Well it was NOTAMed, on page 24 of 85 of the NOTAMs for the flight.

Fixing that is not going to be technological, and has nothing to do with this system wide outage. From the constant email updates we've had overnight, this failure was due to some type of database failure, which has required them to basically rebuild the database overnight and required time to test and validate its operation. Airports were notified this morning that all NOTAMs issued since 1800Z yesterday had been purged and need to be re-issued.
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I can disagree a little bit there, as technological improvements would help a lot. It wouldn't be too difficult to engineer the NOTAM system so that if you put in the departure and arrival airports or intended flight plan/path that the NOTAMS that are actually relevant within X number of miles on either side of the flight path would be included in an easy format to decipher. Information could be neatly grouped by categories like Obstructions, Airport Operations, Navigation Aids, etc. according to that plan. Instead we get to read about the existence of birds in every region of the country at every airport, as if that's truly useful information.
 
Over the holidays the Transportation secretary was on the news shows ranting about Southwest Airlines and declaring how he was going to hold them accountable for the sin of making a poor business decision on how to invest their profits (my assessment; YMMV).

I'll look to see if he is on the news shows tonight to explain how he is going to hold DoT and FAA accountable for what happened today.

IBTL.
 
Does anyone know who actually runs the NOTAM systems? Is it FAA or is it subbed out to Leidos/Lockheed/etc?
 
SoonerAviator said:
I can disagree a little bit there, as technological improvements would help a lot. It wouldn't be too difficult to engineer the NOTAM system so that if you put in the departure and arrival airports or intended flight plan/path that the NOTAMS that are actually relevant within X number of miles on either side of the flight path would be included in an easy format to decipher. Information could be neatly grouped by categories like Obstructions, Airport Operations, Navigation Aids, etc. according to that plan. Instead we get to read about the existence of birds in every region of the country at every airport, as if that's truly useful information.
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I'm not sure how you are receiving your NOTAMs, as there are many sources some better than others, but that is exactly the way I receive them.

My issue with the NOTAM system is it being a catch-all, and being filled with NOTAMs that policy requires, but have little to no impact to flight safety. Think of any NOTAM that is not going to change your flight or your plan. Birds exist...no duh. Obstruction light out...who ever actually plots those out on a map? We could reduce the # of NOTAMs by 75% if we just weighed them on the basis of will this cause a pilot to change their intended plan. No, then don't mention it. My point being, the technology is there, it just isn't being utilized to its full capability, and the system is being bogged down with the irrelevant CYA nonsense.

I always compare it to driving. As the average driver, do you have to receive a list of information about every closed lane, every faded centerline stripe, every traffic signal not operating correctly, before you ever even get in your car. Of course not!
 
NOTAM 1. PAPI is out. That’s a bother
NOTAM 2. Runway is closed. That I want to know about.

I don’t have a solution, but I do see how the important things are buried.
 
midwestpa24 said:
I'm not sure how you are receiving your NOTAMs, as there are many sources some better than others, but that is exactly the way I receive them.

My issue with the NOTAM system is it being a catch-all, and being filled with NOTAMs that policy requires, but have little to no impact to flight safety. Think of any NOTAM that is not going to change your flight or your plan. Birds exist...no duh. Obstruction light out...who ever actually plots those out on a map? We could reduce the # of NOTAMs by 75% if we just weighed them on the basis of will this cause a pilot to change their intended plan. No, then don't mention it. My point being, the technology is there, it just isn't being utilized to its full capability, and the system is being bogged down with the irrelevant CYA nonsense.

I always compare it to driving. As the average driver, do you have to receive a list of information about every closed lane, every faded centerline stripe, every traffic signal not operating correctly, before you ever even get in your car. Of course not!
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I think I see your point. I thought you were implying that the use of technology wouldn't be able to clean up the data. I agree that the technology is already available to parse it, but at least if it was segregated a bit (as well as removing useless data like the "birds around airports" stuff it would clean up the output. It's just a lot of garbage data presented in a poor format with no real way to quickly find the important bits.
 
Jim_R said:
Today I learned that the definition for NOTAM has apparently changed from "Notice to Airmen" to "Notice to Air Missions". I must have missed that NOTAM.
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I feel safer knowing it is “Notice to Air Missions” now versus “Notice to Airmen”. I guess that $1T infrastructure bill has done some good. :D
 
Team DoD was exempted as well. Ironic given the level of outsized risk aversion with which we conduct ourselves on the ground on the daily.
 
From avweb:

https://www.avweb.com/flight-safety/faa-regs/notam-system-outage-halts-u-s-flights/

Technicians were doing a rare reboot of the NOTAM system when the decision was made to issue a ground stop early Wednesday. The system got glitchy on Tuesday afternoon and the agency found a single corrupted file in both the main and backup system according to sources interviewed by CNN. After nudging the system along through Tuesday night, the decision was made to do a reboot in the early morning hours of Wednesday, the network reported. It took longer than anticipated to come back and at 7:30 a.m. the decision was made to halt all departures. It didn’t last long but the effect was far-reaching.
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Apparently my joke about rebooting an antiquated computer was prescient...
 
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I’m surprised the media hasn’t caught on that NOTAMS are still published in all CAPS because the FAA can’t seem to modernize.
 
Initial Fix said:
I’m surprised the media hasn’t caught on that NOTAMS are still published in all CAPS because the FAA can’t seem to modernize.
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That would require using more than 8 bytes of data
 
Jim_R said:
Today I learned that the definition for NOTAM has apparently changed from "Notice to Airmen" to "Notice to Air Missions". I must have missed that NOTAM.
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We should have a national holiday to mark the date this was implemented. As it is a huge step in crushing the male dominance of the cockpit flight deck!

The celebration is marred, however, by the fact that the acronym NOTAM was not changed, and thus most pilots were unaware of the historic event at its inception.

A motion to rename NOTAM to NOTNAMBAM (Notice To Not Airmen But Air Missions) has been suggested and is now in the process of getting approval.
 
Did the Canadian NOTAMS (Notice to Air Maple Syrup I think), go down as well?
 
Half Fast said:
True.

But they could at least be made more readable. Using both upper and lower case letters, paragraph separation, and some plain English would help a lot, instead of having a WALL OF ALL-CAP TEXT MUCH OF WHICH IS LEGALESE JARGON AND ACRONYMS.
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Please don't force the NOTAM system into plain language. You (probably) already have a button on your tablet that will do that for you. Don't turn my multi-page NOTAM printout into something twice it's size by spelling out "Out of service" instead of OTS five hundred times. Or "Not Authorized" to NA.

This isn't directed at you, @Half Fast, just me being the old man yelling at clouds.

[rant]They're abbreviations. And most of them actually make sense. Yes, every once in a while there's some esoteric one that you will have to look up, but they're mostly intelligible. We use abbreviations every day in life and no one is screaming for change, because we've learned them.

No one is trying to get newspapers to use "National Aeronautics and Space Administration" instead of NASA because we don't understand the acronym.

We don't have to spell out N53°23'45" as "North 53 degrees, 23 minutes, 45 seconds" because we learned that "N" is North, "°" is degrees, "'" is minutes, and """ is seconds. And we can even figure out that (even though it looks ridiculous) """ is a degree seconds symbol surrounded by quotation marks, even though it's the same symbol. Also 5'9" we can translate to five foot nine even though it uses the same symbols at LAT/LONG (sorry... latitude and longitude)

We're not calling for a wholesale change of cookbooks because we can't figure out 1/2 tbsp is one-half tablespoon. Or 350°F is three hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

It's just abbreviations. Learn them, or don't. There's always the "decode raw data" button on Foreflight or whatever you use.[/rant]

Half Fast said:
Implementing some topical headings would also make them capable of being filtered. When I’m a VFR pilot flying a VFR plane, I don’t need the briefing to be cluttered with a ton of ILS NOTAMs and instrument approach info.

And those things shouldn’t be hard to fix.
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This is ready done, kinda. Our work NOTAM printout collates the various NOTAMs into categories. It's have all the taxiway NOTAMs grouped into one section, obstacles into another, and runway NOTAMs into another, and so on. It's good and bad. It does make finding important NOTAMs a little easier to find, but it also creates a lot of duplicates. All the runway 18 NOTAMs are typically duplicated in the runway 36 section as well, making the NOTAMs longer.

I wish our system was more like the AeroWeather app. That is in my opinion, the single best aviation app (sorry... application) out there for its NOTAM interface alone. I even use it for work flying (shh... it's probably not allowed). AeroWeather groups NOTAMs into their respective categories, which is nice. But the best part is that it allows you to filter by time. It reads the DTG (sorry... Date-Time Group) and will allow you to filter out the NOTAMs that aren't active outside of a 2/4/12/24 hour period from now. That means I don't have to try and figure out if the UAS (sorry... Unmanned Aircraft System) airspace is going to active when I get there or not. Or if the ILS (sorry... Instrument Landing System) will be in or out at my time of arrival.

If you don't have AeroWeather as part of your planning toolbox, I'd say, give it a try. I pay for the top tier level and it's worth every penny.

Sorry for the rant... now get off my lawn.
 
Rcmutz said:
I feel safer knowing it is “Notice to Air Missions” now versus “Notice to Airmen”. I guess that $1T infrastructure bill has done some good. :D
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It was worth the $1T to me to see all the triggered Boomer snowflakes on Facebook going apoplectic over something that (1) happened months ago, (2) that they just learned about yesterday and (3) changes nothing but (4) harms their fragile male sensitivities.

There wasn't enough popcorn in the world for me to sit back and watch that online ****show.
 
Sluggo63 said:
Please don't force the NOTAM system into plain language. You (probably) already have a button on your tablet that will do that for you. Don't turn my multi-page NOTAM printout into something twice it's size by spelling out "Out of service" instead of OTS five hundred times. Or "Not Authorized" to NA.
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I recall years ago, there was a survey done, perhaps informally, and it was noted that most pilots could read METARs much faster and easier coded rather than plain language. Once you've used them for a while it is much easier to parse the information mentally than to have to read through a bunch of words.

Sluggo63 said:
This is ready done, kinda. Our work NOTAM printout collates the various NOTAMs into categories. It's have all the taxiway NOTAMs grouped into one section, obstacles into another, and runway NOTAMs into another, and so on. It's good and bad. It does make finding important NOTAMs a little easier to find, but it also creates a lot of duplicates. All the runway 18 NOTAMs are typically duplicated in the runway 36 section as well, making the NOTAMs longer.
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As I posted earlier in this thread, all NOTAMs start with one of eight keywords or acronyms, AD, RWY, TWY, APRON, COM, NAV, OBST, or SVC. Most NOTAM services can help you sort by category pretty easily. Within those categories it can get a little confusing though, I'll admit. And again, the biggest problem with the NOTAM system in my opinion, as a daily user and issuer of NOTAMs, isn't the abbreviations, the all CAPS, or the categories, its the sheer volume of virtually useless NOTAMs that the FAA requires be issued. Unlit obstruction NOTAMs are a joke, no one reads them nor tries to figure out where they actually are. If there actually was one that was a danger (say 2,000 feet with 5 miles of the airport) no one would ever notice it. Bird and wildlife NOTAMs are ridiculous, however one of the boxes on the Wildlife Strike Reporting form is "Were pilots warned of wildlife activity?"

If we could reduce mandatory NOTAMs to those truly critical, airport closures, surface closures, surface conditions, systems outages, that would make the whole system much more useable.
 
midwestpa24 said:
As I posted earlier in this thread, all NOTAMs start with one of eight keywords or acronyms, AD, RWY, TWY, APRON, COM, NAV, OBST, or SVC. Most NOTAM services can help you sort by category pretty easily.
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So how do I filter out all the IFR junk that is irrelevant to my VFR flight? And since my plane doesn’t have a CDI, I’d just as soon get rid of the VOR stuff, too. And is there a way to limit the NOTAMs to my departure and destination airports plus a few alternates, so I don’t have to see all of Orlando International’s data since I can’t even get into their Bravo anyway?

If I could do those things, what remains would at least be manageable.

BTW, stuff that’s missing can be just as bad. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found an AWOS out of service, or working but missing data, and there was no NOTAM.
 
Half Fast said:
So how do I filter out all the IFR junk that is irrelevant to my VFR flight? And since my plane doesn’t have a CDI, I’d just as soon get rid of the VOR stuff, too. And is there a way to limit the NOTAMs to my departure and destination airports plus a few alternates, so I don’t have to see all of Orlando International’s data since I can’t even get into their Bravo anyway?

If I could do those things, what remains would at least be manageable.

BTW, stuff that’s missing can be just as bad. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found an AWOS out of service, or working but missing data, and there was no NOTAM.
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Yeah, NOTAMs are not segregated by VFR/IFR. I can see how that could be beneficial, but there could also be gotchas with that as well. One may be VFR, but using VORs for navigation, so how do you differentiate that?

Just curious, what are you using for your flight briefings? I use primarily Foreflight these days, and you once you input the departure, destination, and route, it gathers the NOTAMs for everything within 20 miles of the two airports and your route. But it also sorts the NOTAMs for Departure, Destination, Enroute, and by the category of NOTAM.
 
I will also add in regards to Plain Language versus ALL CAPS ABBR, the current technology does allow for that. When we input a NOTAM through NOTAM Manager, we are using a series of pre-built scenarios with pre-filled drop down boxes to select the information for the NOTAM. The system then displays for us the NOTAM in FAA, ICAO, and Plain Language formats. The technology is there, but it is a matter of the end user's source of information in how it is being delivered.
 
I think stiff fines for tower lights that are out for more than 2 weeks.
 
I think the bigger picture is beyond changing from all caps to mixed case. It's knowledge management. What is the most important information to place where it can be the first communicated. What information is relevant? There is a reason why you search on google on a relevant topic vs reading the entire internet to hopefully find what is important to you. Some human factors and knowledge management science would go a long way.
 
I hate it when they change the term to make the Acronym. While I’m all for inclusion and recognize the many women in aviation, we’re all still Hu-man beings, right?

Notice to Air Mission is just bad English.
 
Nick Geber said:
I hate it when they change the term to make the Acronym. While I’m all for inclusion and recognize the many women in aviation, we’re all still Hu-man beings, right?

Notice to Air Mission is just bad English.
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We already had like an 8,000 page thread about this
 
I saw a news article yesterday morning claiming that "pilots check NOTAMs before flight" and knew right away that the rest of the article would be full of half-truths. The ridiculous over-NOTAMing is definitely the problem. For example, the closest 5G cell tower to me is 500 miles away. There are no approaches for which a radio altimeter matters. And yet we have the standard, issued-everywhere, full-page-length NOTAM about 5G C-band interference. I don't know why the FAA would issue that NOTAM anywhere, especially covering places so far from any possible 5G interference, other than as a passive-aggressive protest against 5G rolling out faster than the FAA wanted.

How many TFR busts were because the pilot was too busy trying to dodge unlit towers and didn't notice the NOTAM about the TFR, which was probably published while he was still reading about security concerns flying in Afghanistan airspace?
 
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iamtheari said:
I saw a news article yesterday morning claiming that "pilots check NOTAMs before flight" and knew right away that the rest of the article would be full of half-truths. The ridiculous over-NOTAMing is definitely the problem. For example, the closest 5G cell tower to me is 500 miles away. There are no approaches at which a radio altimeter matters. And yet we have the standard, issued-everywhere, full-page-length NOTAM about 5G C-band interference. I don't know why the FAA would issue that NOTAM anywhere, especially covering places so far from any possible 5G interference, other than as a passive-aggressive protest against 5G rolling out faster than the FAA wanted.

How many TFR busts were because the pilot was too busy trying to dodge unlit towers and didn't notice the NOTAM about the TFR, which was probably published while he was still reading about security concerns flying in Afghanistan airspace?
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Especially the 5G thing. There are a limited number of aircraft types that have been found to have issues with C-Band interference from 5G. It would be far easier to issue an AD for the affected aircraft to put a sticker in the cockpit.

That being said we started getting that NOTAM here, a month later we had 5G go live in our area. I think most of the country will have been upgraded to 5G cell networks by this year.
 
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