Unread NOTAMs

Pilawt

Pilawt

Final Approach
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Pilawt
No secret that the system for dissemination of NOTAMs is flawed. Sure, some NOTAMs are hopelessly obtuse; but others are pretty clear, and readily available.

Yesterday I used Foreflight to brief a VFR trip from El Monte CA to Goodyear AZ. (Weather was absolutely perfect, C, A, V & U all the way with calm winds at 11,500' and not even a single bump. Wished I could have bottled it.)

The briefing included the usual pages and pages of NOTAMs warning to stay out of Afghanistan and North Korea, and don't drink the water in Bangladesh. But there was a real easy one out of Palm Springs, just a few miles from our route:

Service ATIS 118.25 CHANGED TO 124.65. 31 MAY 12:30 2018 UNTIL permanent. CREATED: 30 MAY 19:53 2018​

Doncha know we heard two aircraft (one a Centurion talking to SoCal, the other a major air carrier jet still with LA Center) inbound to KPSP whining to ATC that they couldn't get the ATIS on 118.25, and would the controller please check to see if it was operating. In both instances the controllers didn't know about the change either.

:rolleyes:
 
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It seems like Foreflight could definitely do a better a better job of screening out extraneous and impertinent NOTAMs.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
It seems like Foreflight could definitely do a better a better job of screening out extraneous and impertinent NOTAMs.
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You don’t want software filtering official information. They already categorize it all, but NOTAMS are busted at the root creation level.

I always enjoy reading how the terrorists are going to shoot my Cessna down with a MANPAD in my NOTAMS. Right up there with the possibility of a large meteorite hitting my aircraft.
 
Pilawt said:
Service ATIS 118.25 CHANGED TO 124.65. 31 MAY 12:30 2018 UNTIL permanent. CREATED: 30 MAY 19:53 2018​

Doncha know we heard two aircraft (one a Centurion talking to SoCal, the other a major air carrier jet still with LA Center) inbound to KPSP whining to ATC that they couldn't get the ATIS on 118.25, and would the controller please check to see if it was operating. In both instances the controllers didn't know about the change either.
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"If there's a NOTAM at our destination then I'm sure they'll put it on the ATIS." ;)
 
Pilawt said:
No secret that the system for dissemination of NOTAMs is flawed. Sure, some NOTAMs are hopelessly obtuse; but others are pretty clear, and readily available.

Yesterday I used Foreflight to brief a VFR trip from El Monte CA to Goodyear AZ. (Weather was absolutely perfect, C, A, V & U all the way with calm winds at 11,500' and not even a single bump. Wished I could have bottled it.)

The briefing included the usual pages and pages of NOTAMs warning to stay out of Afghanistan and North Korea, and don't drink the water in Bangladesh. But there was a real easy one out of Palm Springs, just a few miles from our route:

Service ATIS 118.25 CHANGED TO 124.65. 31 MAY 12:30 2018 UNTIL permanent. CREATED: 30 MAY 19:53 2018​

Doncha know we heard two aircraft (one a Centurion talking to SoCal, the other a major air carrier jet still with LA Center) inbound to KPSP whining to ATC that they couldn't get the ATIS on 118.25, and would the controller please check to see if it was operating. In both instances the controllers didn't know about the change either.

:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Flawed??? How about broken. Maybe the best background on this is the Stella Report. You didn’t warn me about every little thang so it’s your fault
 
denverpilot said:
You don’t want software filtering official information. They already categorize it all, but NOTAMS are busted at the root creation level.
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Maybe, but why not? Especially a configurable filter. Things way away from my line of flight and halfway around the world seem like a waste of time to even scan.

And it strikes me it may even create a sort of “boy who cried wolf” effect where people just skip over all of them or whole blocks.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
Maybe, but why not? Especially a configurable filter. Things way away from my line of flight and halfway around the world seem like a waste of time to even scan.

And it strikes me it may even create a sort of “boy who cried wolf” effect where people just skip over all of them or whole blocks.
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What would they filter on? Nothing in the NOTAM tells the computer (your iPad) "this is halfway around the world"... FAA spams it out in FDC NOTAMS, their "catch all" NOTAM type for long and mostly useless NOTAMS about terrorists and such, even when they know your route of flight. Not much software can do about it. FAA needs to move the non-time-essential "permanent" junk like the terrorism crap, to the AIM.
 
denverpilot said:
What would they filter on? Nothing in the NOTAM tells the computer (your iPad) "this is halfway around the world"... FAA spams it out in FDC NOTAMS, their "catch all" NOTAM type for long and mostly useless NOTAMS about terrorists and such, even when they know your route of flight. Not much software can do about it. FAA needs to move the non-time-essential "permanent" junk like the terrorism crap, to the AIM.
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Agreed it would be better if the FAA moved this permanent "junk" out of the NOTAMs. But it seems like a higher level of parsing of the text of the NOTAM could help here. For example, on a vfr flight from KFFZ to U69 at 9500 feet , one could parse the text of "chart correct U.S. government IFR enroute high altitude chart H10" and realize this has nothing to do with anything near the route of flight. Also in international notams, the text "security..united states of america advisory for the korean peninsula" is a clue this has nothing to do with the route of flight.

One could probably use a probabilistic algorithm to get rid of the ones clearly halfway around the world and default to leaving them in if not clear.
 
I love the ones that are "Runway 24: third runway light on the left inoperative". If the rest are still working, why are we worried about one runway light? I not only don't care but probably can't even find it.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
Agreed it would be better if the FAA moved this permanent "junk" out of the NOTAMs. But it seems like a higher level of parsing of the text of the NOTAM could help here. For example, on a vfr flight from KFFZ to U69 at 9500 feet , one could parse the text of "chart correct U.S. government IFR enroute high altitude chart H10" and realize this has nothing to do with anything near the route of flight. Also in international notams, the text "security..united states of america advisory for the korean peninsula" is a clue this has nothing to do with the route of flight.

One could probably use a probabilistic algorithm to get rid of the ones clearly halfway around the world and default to leaving them in if not clear.
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AFAIK if your route of flight doesn’t touch H10 or go under it, you won’t get that example NOTAM in your FDC NOTAM results.

ForeFlight can’t leave it out because FAA is concerned you might climb into the Flight Levels, I suppose... hell if I know.

If we can update every piece of software we have daily, we could probably just go to daily chart updates too. LOL. Why not lower the quality of the charts and introduce “bugs” as fast as software does these days? :)
 
denverpilot said:
AFAIK if your route of flight doesn’t touch H10 or go under it, you won’t get that example NOTAM in your FDC NOTAM results.
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Well ... in the briefing for my VFR flight from El Monte CA to Goodyear AZ a couple of days ago, there were FDC NOTAMS for corrections to the Washington, Green Bay, Miami and Detroit sectional charts, among others.
 
Pilawt said:
Well ... in the briefing for my VFR flight from El Monte CA to Goodyear AZ a couple of days ago, there were FDC NOTAMS for corrections to the Washington, Green Bay, Miami and Detroit sectional charts, among others.
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Interesting. I wonder if that changes when taken from different sources. I don't think I have time to try them all to find out.

I bet... if you called an FSS briefer, they'd omit them. :)

Old school rant... everyone wants the computers, but the computers then overload everyone with total crap they don't need... and then they wonder why Flight Service has gone downhill... or many have never known a Flight Service that was useful and weeded out the crap... and FAA says all that crap is a "standard briefing" and mandatory for every flight, by law.

The whole "teletype based" system we have today has historical roots in having someone smart pulling the piles of info off the teletypes and boiling it down to apply it to a particular pilot's flight.

A re-design for the modern computer era would need to create a bunch of official categories that could be turned on and off by the pilot at briefing time, and even set for some that never apply to them to be on "permanent ignore" in their software. "Opt-out" or "Opt-in" wouldn't really matter.

We're still disseminating them like there's a teletype at an FSS and a bunch of Flight Service folk standing around to filter out the noise for us. That's really the root-cause problem.

The junk NOTAMs were always happening back in the day, we just never saw it. Not until we started logging into DUAT/DUATS via telnet and seeing the huge pile of garbage the average FSS staffer was wading through to give us a reasonable briefing.
 
Pilawt said:
Well ... in the briefing for my VFR flight from El Monte CA to Goodyear AZ a couple of days ago, there were FDC NOTAMS for corrections to the Washington, Green Bay, Miami and Detroit sectional charts, among others.
Click to expand...

This is exactly the sort of thing that is happening to me in Foreflight all the time. This is where I think Foreflight could do a better job of screening out things like chart corrections that are nowhere near the route of flight.
 
timwinters said:
L...
I...
A...
B...
I...
L...
I...
T...
Y...
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Ding ding ding ding ding. Tim wins the prize. :)

The only way to get the NOTAM system to NOT spew out stuff off of the route of flight, is going to be at the source... FAA computer that issued the briefing.

Anything removed from an "official" briefing, Foreflight becomes responsible for not showing it to you.
 
Already covered. See thread around here discussing the impossible glut of info pilots are required to know for every flight.

In that thread I posted how once, after a multi-leg day with weather that I copied and pasted all FF notams and weather into an app which allowed word counting. Looking online, I found that it compared well to a small novel; one which would take hours to read.
In other words, pilots cannot read it all. And they don't, except for short trips or few-leg trips especially with little weather.....or pea-patch flyers.
I sent an ASRS out with all these details to see if there was any response; nope.
They are happy with us bearing the impossible burden; blame the pilot is a fun game.
 
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