Greece does a particularly useful practice of notaming the airport opening hours, and this information is accurate.
I guess, this is the result of their AIP being not online (till very recently) and thus being read by practically nobody.
It would be a pity to lose this, because AIPs are very variable in their accuracy. So variable that I almost never look at any nowadays (probably true for most pilots 
) and always contact the airport(s) directly.
Atmilatos, many thanks for the link. This is indeed what I have been hoping for for a long while. I am particularly interested by
[dead link]
though I don’t find the time now to peruse it all in detail. Still it offers a hope of what we ultimately want IMHO: official data in a standardised machine-readable format, so that anybody can read these data and superimpose them on a map of their own preference.
I certainly feel like subscribing as a contributor.
All of the ambiguity of NOTAMs will go away with the use of AIXM (http://www.aixm.aero/public/subsite_homepage/homepage.html) and other such efforts.
e.g. In my application (http://geo-carto-02.aegean.gr/AERO/OL/aero_webgis_ol.html) I derive NOTAM polygons from their text, and if the polygon is not outlined, I draw a circle. Of course the NOTAM originator may make a mistake and mix a number with a letter (e.g. “0” and “O”), which drives the parser crazy – the application’s job is not to correct the mistakes of the originator. In order to avoid all this silly stuff, everything must be standardized and validated before being sent to the network.
Another example are airport hour of operation NOTAMs, airway availability stuff, etc. If there a standard was followed by everyone, then every application would be able to parse the correct information.
It’ ll happen one day.
I also hear from FIS people that they are often wondering aloud about why every GA pilot asks about activity of R-Areas or D-Areas despite them being clearly written on the NOTAMS or other products (DABS for instance) which people NEED to look at.
Well probably some of them are lazy and find it easier to rely on FIS than to do the painful job of listing NOTAMS and checking them. But there may be an other reason. On several (many) occasions, I found out that R areas which were active according to NOTAMS were actually deactivated. Especially the military training or low level high speed zones. They usually “book” them by NOTAM for a longer period of time than the one during which they will really use them. So it’s worth asking the question because you may discover that a direct is possible where you had planned a flight around the zone. it really happened to me quite a lot in France.
But then if you can’t trust some notams coming via a flight planning app, can you trust any of them?
The problem in my opinion is not the reliability of the NOTAMS themselves, but the reliability of the way the software gets them. There may be a communication problem, a server problem… If any of these happens, will the software be aware of it and will it let you know?
(You probably know that this is the difference between an IFR approved GPS and a plain GPS : the IFR approved one is able to understand that the data it gets is inconsistent and will let you know. The latter one will compute a position no matter what it gets.)
African Eagle just beat me to it. Same here, albeit with a GPS ;-) No big deal, really. The only country in Europe that has REALLY anal airspace (and unreadable charts and crap / no ATC) is the UK. Everywhere else is fine.
I have to confess to having crossed Europe North South East & West VFR without a GPS just using maps acquired for the countries over flown. Never had a problem with airspace.
I am one of those to confess not to even think about doing a VFR trip to France, Belgium, and the like, knowing the absurd airspace structures there. I´d get p…d within a few minutes trying to figure out a routing in order to fight a passage to my target airfield. And there is little consolation knowing French ATC might be very helpful in clearing the way for me. This is just not something I´d call VFR flying. And contrary to many pilots complaining about all sorts of things I do believe and feel that VFR flying in Germany is indeed real freedom of flight – compared with neighbouring countries. I might give this another thought provided PocketFMS (member since 2006) could come up with a reliable and administration approved notam based airspace management. The present situation is unacceptable and PFMS is not to blame, it´s rather the way how notams are generated, distributed and updated. But this is just another area of aviation legislation that produces uncertainty among pilots who try to do their very best to avoid mistakes but nevertheless keep thinking they may have overlooked something that could lead to a law case. One may come to believe some organisations tried to trick pilots into that kind of situations …..
Cheers VicVery valid concerns folks! That is why I said: some ressources already available and others possibly not yet.
It’s a VISION, not something which might pop up tomorrow, but I believe it would be a goal worth working towards.
A few things however:
- The principle would have to be: When in any doubt whatsoever, display the thing in bright red or whatever coulour you use.
- There are lots of restricted areas which are hardwired to specific operating times, such as Mo-Fri H24 for a lot of military and “working” aereas which work basically “office times”. Those which are per AIP and Navdata CLEARLY identified to have FIXED operating times and are not activatable by NOTAM or other means, are the easy part of it.
- Some countries have organized NOTAM docs which give a clear source of information as to which areas are active and which are not. Switzerland has this (DABS), I understand Poland has and so have some others. THIS is the kind of data I’d like to see coordinated into ONE legally binding database which then could be used by flight planning and moving map applications.
- Generally speaking, all NOTAM activated danger and restricted areas MUST appear in the relevant NOTAMs which today are freely available and are used, for instance by Pocket FMS and others. So generally again, it is a question of reading this database and to use it’s information on airspace restrictions which are CLEARLY identifyable as well as their status being CLEARLY identifyable from the Notams.
As far as I have been told and informed many times, this is how things should work. I also hear from FIS people that they are often wondering aloud about why every GA pilot asks about activity of R-Areas or D-Areas despite them being clearly written on the NOTAMS or other products (DABS for instance) which people NEED to look at. The answer they get is, “how do I know they have not been activated since?” Well, that, folks, makes the whole NOTAM exercise totally useless.Then why read the NOTAMS on special use airspace at all? If we can not trust them, they might well not be there.
I would never fly through a restricted area unless some controller either told me clearly that it was not active or cleared me through it. Never would I rely on a piece of software for this, even if it were allegedly “connected” with live servers.
That is exactly the point. People don’t even trust the “official” Notams they have in their HANDS, as FIS operators will be more than happy to tell you. Then why have it at all? Why trust the Navdata? Why do we trust our ICAO Maps at all? If it is not guaranteed that with the NOTAMS and charts you get before your flight that they remain up to date until the conclusion on a SAME day, then the whole exercise as it is is mute.
And it is abundantly clear, there should be a COMMON and FREELY accessable LEGAL database (such as for instance the RAD Document by Eurocontrol) for this which then can be used with CONFIDENCE. Anything else is useless.
Personally, I believe that a lot of airspace infringements we get today are the result of airspace structures which a “normal” person has pains to come to terms with. We get 100 R and D areas of which maybe 10 are active at any given time. For many VFR pilots this means they avoid places like France or Belgium altogether, even though there is no reason for that. That is why I personally believe that an application which can give you a trusted and accepted visual representation of what really is going on would greatly enhance safety and reduce airspace infringements dramatically.
Who does it is not really important, I could imagine Eurocontrol to come up with such a site or even EASA (if they finally want their “Safety” part used for something practicable for a change) to produce the database, then make it available for all software producers as well as display it on a freely available website, as they do with notams now.
There is a digital NOTAM project underway which I understand will make these all fully machine readable. When that comes along, it should be possible to do this reliably.
How are they going to force the notam creator (a “human”) to not make mistakes?
The only way I can see would be to force everybody to use a piece of software (or some website based tool) which forces the originator to use a predefined form, and forces him to draw any graphical representation using that tool also.
Or, it will generate the graphical representation using the textual data provided, and will require him to check a “I am happy with this graphical presentation” box before the notam is accepted into the system.
Plus of course data validation on any textual data. But stuff like getting the lat or long 1 degree out can be picked up only by plotting the stuff onto an underlying map, there and then, and requiring the originator to validate that.
I am sure lots of anorak/geek/nerd time at Eurocontrol has gone into solving this issue, but they are going to have a lot of fun rolling out the data entry tool to every notam originator worldwide
The alternative is to spend a piece of the EU budget (0.0000000001% would be ample) on paying a bunch of humans to sit in Brussels and checking all the notams arriving on their server via the AFTN 
