Official: NOTAMs are garbage
Love it.
I find Foreflight’s presentation of Notams pretty reasonable – much better than the official French source. Which, as others have said, is a confusing jumble of 20 foot tall cranes, closed airspace in Kyrgyzstan, and just occasionally something relevant, like the runway you were planning to land on is being resurfaced.
arj1 wrote:
So before you submit, you have to choose one or more categories.
Would that work?
That is pretty much how it’s done by most EFB and briefing platforms already. Still, the results are not always satisfactory. For instance, there is a huge number of obstacle notams which may or may not be relevant to the airport in question, yet, most of them still get included. Other stuff includes general immigration or customs problems such as the Covid problematics, which end up on every print out as they are coded such that they pass most filters. And so on.
It’s a very tight rope between the desire to reduce NOTAM load and CYA.
arj1 wrote:
So before you submit, you have to choose one or more categories.
Would that work?
Such categorisation can be done with the existing NOTAM system (and indeed is done by EFB programs). At least as long as the NOTAMs are properly coded.
arj1 wrote:
So before you submit, you have to choose one or more categories.
Would that work?
No. This IS the current SOP – you already have to choose a category when submitting a NOTAM, but the system is too fuzzy to be helpful.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Of course, the problem with that is pretty straightforward: Suppress the wrong NOTAM and YOU are guilty of withholding information to an aircrew possibly causing an accident. Not filter thoroughly enough, you piss off the people who haved to contend with 20 pages of NOTAMS for a 10 minute VFR flight.
@Mooney_Driver, I think if the NOTAMs had to be separated into the following categories (by the originator), then it would have already helped:
1. only departure/destination NOTAMs
2. only if entering/leaving country
3. country-wide NOTAMs affecting all a/c
4. only for low-flying a/c (1000ft AGL and below)
5. enroute notams
So before you submit, you have to choose one or more categories.
Would that work?
eddsPeter wrote:
In general speaking. Most of the displayed notam are irrelevant regarding my flight missions, but from time to time they are. So I take it as a task to have a look on them and won’t get angry when reading “bad news”.
Clearly, as pilots, we need to know about all information that may affect our planned flight. The essential point about NOTAMs though is that the “system” is broken, based on a design meant for the telegraph and often written in a way that is impossible or very time-consuming to decipher or understand.
Unfortunately this is not new knowledge. There just hasn’t been any coordinated effort made to replace it. No entity seems to feel responsible to take on the tasks. @Mooney_Driver has suggested a few starting steps, and the EFBs we use have provided some relief by translating the endless list of coordinates into graphic form. Unfortunately again Europe is subject to the “every country for itself” rule as far as providing official tools to assist and that doesn’t help much for a flight crossing several countries.
But as I said, it is very difficult to do the way NOTAMS are generated now.
Why? After all they are much more standardised than Emails, and typically either come with coordinates or could be given coordinates. I don’t actually mind being told about a crane near the airport, but I do mind being told about cranes hundreds of miles away from where I plan to fly.
So I take it as a task to have a look on them and won’t get angry when reading “bad news”.
Positive mind set 
