Are there too many NOTAMs?

cowman

cowman

Final Approach
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Cowman
I ran across this on facebook, kind of an interesting thing to consider.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=328745954357988

Associated link: http://flightservicebureau.org/the-problem-of-********-notams/
*edit looks like the board censored by link. replace the **** with bullsh_t and you'll get it


I have to admit, I do scroll through most of them without really reading in detail as most of it is a bunch of BS that's not important and I'm never going to remember all the towers along my route with burnt out light bulbs or any of that garbage.

We do have so much to check and and keep track of for any flight, there is such a thing as information overload.
 
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Yes.
So much info that the really important stuff gets overwhelmed.
Last week, I was lucky enough to notice the navaid providing the only approach into my destination was ots. (It was just above mins, not like I had any other way in. Scrubbed.)
Could easily have missed it poring through the insane reams of, well - bulls*t.
See my thread where I did a word count on a multileg day's briefings when the weather was sucky. It compared in size to a small novel and was physically impossible to read and digest at normal reading rates in, I think it was an hour. And a good part of it was irrelevant.
I put in an asrs on this finding. Probably should do one on this topic monthly to see if I can get their attention about the problem.
 
I've been saying this all along. A decade ago when I first started my career in aviation, there was a big push for plain language NOTAMs, METARs, and TAFs. Today we continue to add more acronyms and abbreviations to the NOTAM system, or change ones because someone in Europe didn't like ours. The FAA encourages operators to issue more NOTAMs, as a CYA. That way if a pilot screws up, we can say we did our job and warned him. And don't even get me started on TALPA.
 
One possible solution I offered was to present things along my route first, or at least in bold so the ‘airport closed’ would receive a little more attention than the volcanic ash 3000 miles away, or the 19 unlit towers under 300’.
(Yes, the closure has caught people)
 
The notam system is terrible, there is no guarantee you'll find an important one in whatever brief you get, or that the actual conditions at the airport have been noticed and NOTAMed.
 
I think until there are incidents, or incidents revealed, little will happen.
Especially with the airlines; they don't care a lot about us little guys.

Someone should at least come up with a search program which can go through the text of a briefing and pick out keywords for us.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
Someone should at least come up with a search program which can go through the text of a briefing and pick out keywords for us.
Click to expand...

Agree the current system is a mess. I try to check them and end up skimming a lot, would likely have missed the SF runway one. Also think the keyword idea is good. Having said that, can't imagine anyone with more than two nickels to rub together would do that, given the potential liability.

Like the NTSB kicking the FAA around a bit. The acronym fest for NOTAMS and METARS is an artifact of the Telegraph/Teletype where letter count mattered. Ironic that shortened language has created 58 pages for a briefing for a 2 hour flight.
 
Why did they all raise their hands occasionally?
 
Hang 4 said:
Think the dialog was not synced with the video - Looked like they were voting "all in favor raise your right hand"
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Yeah that’s what I was thinking too, voting, just looked strange.
 
I'd say it's fair to say that a large percentage of this notam clutter, at least for our area, is due to faulty tower lighting. If the FCC and the FAA would enforce their written rules and regulations, a large percentage of these hazards to navigation notams would disappear. A few hefty fines handed down to the tower operators for their failure to properly maintain their tower lighting systems is definitely in order.
And then there's the frivolous notams, the ones that are simple to ignore, simple to fix, or are nothing more than a cya for lazy facility operators. Yes, the present notam system has tons of issues and needs attention, and overhaul.
 
Weathermeister color codes the really important ones which seems to help.

Screenshot from 2018-09-28 08-58-12.png
 
Art Rose said:
I'd say it's fair to say that a large percentage of this notam clutter, at least for our area, is due to faulty tower lighting. If the FCC and the FAA would enforce their written rules and regulations, a large percentage of these hazards to navigation notams would disappear. A few hefty fines handed down to the tower operators for their failure to properly maintain their tower lighting systems is definitely in order.
And then there's the frivolous notams, the ones that are simple to ignore, simple to fix, or are nothing more than a cya for lazy facility operators. Yes, the present notam system has tons of issues and needs attention, and overhaul.
Click to expand...
Twenty years ago, I could easily make a cross-country flight with one or maybe two NOTAMS affecting (at least in someone's opinion) affecting the trip. I would like to see them rated by safety-of-flight criteria.
 
I bet I get 20 emails a day of NOTAMS that our local airport is "cutting grass along RWY24" Then 15 minutes later another NOTAM saying it's canceled. What a waste of time.
 
They can stop telling us about old navigation beacons no longer in service (NDB, ILS markers..,)
And they are not allowed to notam a runway closing for example until 24 hours before, so this results in cancelled notams.
 
It took a tree to print the flight releases I'd get in the airlines. 2/3 of it was random ass FDC NOTAMs that took a magnifying glass and a computer degree to read. Heck, I always saw the exact same Volcano Ash report from the Philippians?!??

Even funnier was when I was doing GSP-CLT. It's like 60 miles and the NOTAM(s) took up 20 pages.

They need to get away from teletype formatting of the 50s and go to plain language organized NOTAMs. Get rid of D and FDC. Call them like "Local", "Navigation", "Airspace", "Obstructions", "Informational/Hazards" and "Security/Blanket". That would cover 99%
 
ARFlyer said:
It took a tree to print the flight releases I'd get in the airlines. 2/3 of it was random ass FDC NOTAMs that took a magnifying glass and a computer degree to read. Heck, I always saw the exact same Volcano Ash report from the Philippians?!??

Even funnier was when I was doing GSP-CLT. It's like 60 miles and the NOTAM(s) took up 20 pages.

They need to get away from teletype formatting of the 50s and go to plain language organized NOTAMs. Get rid of D and FDC. Call them like "Local", "Navigation", "Airspace", "Obstructions", "Informational/Hazards" and "Security/Blanket". That would cover 99%
Click to expand...

Hear hear for plain language! And I think "Security Blanket" would cover 2/3 of what's issued, with Local, Nav, Airspace and Info covering the rest.
 
Hank S said:
Hear hear for plain language! And I think "Security Blanket" would cover 2/3 of what's issued, with Local, Nav, Airspace and Info covering the rest.
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We ain't paying by the letter anymore to send them via telegraph lines to a Dot Matrix printer at the AA SABRE Desk in the Crew Room.
 
ARFlyer said:
It took a tree to print the flight releases I'd get in the airlines. 2/3 of it was random ass FDC NOTAMs that took a magnifying glass and a computer degree to read. Heck, I always saw the exact same Volcano Ash report from the Philippians?!??

Even funnier was when I was doing GSP-CLT. It's like 60 miles and the NOTAM(s) took up 20 pages.

They need to get away from teletype formatting of the 50s and go to plain language organized NOTAMs. Get rid of D and FDC. Call them like "Local", "Navigation", "Airspace", "Obstructions", "Informational/Hazards" and "Security/Blanket". That would cover 99%
Click to expand...

There is a list of keywords that are used to group NOTAMs, about the only thing they have done right. They are RWY, TWY, RAMP, APRON, AD, OBST, NAV, COM, SVC, AIRSPACE.
 
MauleSkinner said:
So how many pages of plain language NOTAMS to cover the 20 pages of abbreviated?
Click to expand...

A LOT of it is the crappy use of Geographic Bounding. I DO NOT CARE about R-9999 is in use on the West Coast, Volcanic Ash in Iceland, RCO in ORD in OTS, 99+ Towers below 500' and miles from any usable airport, and that the ADIZ exists. Which I've seen all for that GSP-CLT flight.

I've also been very surprised by the lack of information in NOTAMs. One obstacle NOTAM almost killed me in Destin. "CRANE 1.0 SE AT XXX' FROM DTS" DOES NOT come across the way it should have. It should have read "CRANE 1.0 SE ON RUNWAY CENTERLINE AT GLIDESLOPE HEIGHT". I never want to see a crane materialize in my windscreen while on final again. FBO told us a corporate jet almost hit the crane a few days prior. The pilot saw an American Flag blur past his window and never knew what it was until a ramp guy walked up white as a ghost.
 
No there are not too many Notams, there is too long a period before data is published on charts or AF/D. If the FAA did away with paper and updated digital charts every 14 days most of Notams would disappear.
 
ARFlyer said:
A LOT of it is the crappy use of Geographic Bounding. I DO NOT CARE about R-9999 is in use on the West Coast, Volcanic Ash in Iceland, RCO in ORD in OTS, 99+ Towers below 500' and miles from any usable airport, and that the ADIZ exists. Which I've seen all for that GSP-CLT flight.

I've also been very surprised by the lack of information in NOTAMs. One obstacle NOTAM almost killed me in Destin. "CRANE 1.0 SE AT XXX' FROM DTS" DOES NOT come across the way it should have. It should have read "CRANE 1.0 SE ON RUNWAY CENTERLINE AT GLIDESLOPE HEIGHT". I never want to see a crane materialize in my windscreen while on final again. FBO told us a corporate jet almost hit the crane a few days prior. The pilot saw an American Flag blur past his window and never knew what it was until a ramp guy walked up white as a ghost.
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That runway should have been closed.

The is the problem with the obstacle NOTAMs. Even a local flight around here brings up probably a dozen wind turbines with a light out of service. Does anyone sit down and plot each one on the map and decide if it affects the safety of the flight. Doubt it.

Honestly Foreflight does seem to be best at sorting and delivering pertinent NOTAMs to the user. It shows TFRs on the map, pops up red messages if a NOTAM is pertinent to the airport or the approach being used.

The other weakness of the NOTAM system is how to receive them inflight. I've had pilots complain to us when they would fly three hours to our airport only to find that a runway or the whole airport was closed unexpectedly at some point during their flight, but there was no means to pass that along until they get within radio range. If they had received the information promptly they could have diverted sooner.
 
We kick the FAA around on this stuff. And we should. It's a mix of incompetence and burueacratic negligence. Elevating the trivial to the essential, thus obscuring the critical. Add in a big dose of CYA, badly organized data, and dumb-ass process, and this is what we get.
 
I’d love to see a reduction in the amount of NOTAMs. I don’t care about unlighted towers or NDBs out of service. Information overload in the name of CYA is coming at the expense of real safety.
 
On the other hand, suppose you were making a daytime VFR flight - if you didn't get the list of unlighted towers via NOTAM, how would you know that they aren't working when they would be off anyhow?
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
On the other hand, suppose you were making a daytime VFR flight - if you didn't get the list of unlighted towers via NOTAM, how would you know that they aren't working when they would be off anyhow?
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Aren't most lighted towers lit 24/7?
 
midwestpa24 said:
There is a list of keywords that are used to group NOTAMs, about the only thing they have done right. They are RWY, TWY, RAMP, APRON, AD, OBST, NAV, COM, SVC, AIRSPACE.
Click to expand...

But even those get screwed up, because the NOTAM system doesn't force entries to have one of those, so once in a while a human will key in "AP" instead of "AD", or just flat-out have a typo. Then, that screws up the systems (like ForeFlight) that try to help us get the correct NOTAMs!

The system is pretty broken, IMO. Certainly outdated.
 
Yeah.. definite way too much data on there where the relevant stuff gets obscured. The challenge is, that the way the regs are written as a pilot you have to make yourself "familiar with all available information concerning that flight" <- that's a huge blanket statement.. but, if I'm flying day VFR from MYF to SBP do I need to do know that one of the VASI for one of the runways at some random airport sort of along my route is out? No way.

That's where having a much smarter system would be advantageous.. here are your "relevant" notams.. "the SMO VOR is out" vs 10 paragraphs of legal jargon

I can only imagine that overhauling that system would be a disaster, and you are better off with some tool like Foreflight, or some other APP to be able to read and parse all the notams and give you a more cliff notes version
 
There were 86 Notams listed for our area this morning. Out of that clutter, 17 of those Notams were for OBST TOWER LGT. It's become the norm. There are rules, and actually some fairly hefty fines associated with this, but apparently nobody cares.
 
Tantalum said:
The challenge is, that the way the regs are written as a pilot you have to make yourself "familiar with all available information concerning that flight" <- that's a huge blanket statement..
Click to expand...
And this, of course, requires information on football / nascar / baseball schedules which are NOT in the NOTAMs (other than, don't go there at the wrong times).
 
Of course, we could engage in a week of protest by getting all of our briefings by phone and asking the friendly briefer to read all relevant notams...
 
flyingcheesehead said:
But even those get screwed up, because the NOTAM system doesn't force entries to have one of those, so once in a while a human will key in "AP" instead of "AD", or just flat-out have a typo. Then, that screws up the systems (like ForeFlight) that try to help us get the correct NOTAMs!

The system is pretty broken, IMO. Certainly outdated.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree the system is broken, but the system does indeed require one of the keywords.

NOTAMs must be properly formatted or they will be rejected. The NOTAM manager system a lot of airports use to issue NOTAMs uses prebuilt scenarios and drop down menus for 95% of all NOTAMs to ensure formatting. Trust me, I only issue about 500 NOTAMs a year, mostly field conditions in winter months.
 
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