NOTAMS Are Garbage, says the NTSB chief

zaitcev

zaitcev

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Pete Zaitcev
Nothing too new for anyone who's tried to wade through the FDC legalese masquerading as a NOTAM in every briefing, but it required a high-profile mishap to draw a modicum of attention to the problem.

I think the reaction is already happening, mostly taking the form of the EFB and flight planning apps make filtering more powerful. We now use computers to deal with the deluge.

King's suggestions in the article were modest: just using the lowercase letters and keywords, mostly. Probably won't make any dent in the usability of the NOTAM system.

20190210_notams.jpg
 
I agree. Too much useless information mixed in with the important stuff.
 
You could have the best, most sophisticated system in the world and many pilots still won’t read them. So I have to wonder, is there a problem with the system or a problem with the people using the system?

It always amazes me how many pilots willingly violate 91.103. I have given lots of flight instruction for advanced certificates and ratings and have found that many pilots talk a good talk about always getting a preflight briefing and doing everything by the book then don’t follow through with it until I insist we do it. And we wonder why people fly through TFRs or land at closed airports or whatever other dumb thing they might do?
 
mondtster said:
You could have the best, most sophisticated system in the world and many pilots still won’t read them. So I have to wonder, is there a problem with the system or a problem with the people using the system?

It always amazes me how many pilots willingly violate 91.103. I have given lots of flight instruction for advanced certificates and ratings and have found that many pilots talk a good talk about always getting a preflight briefing and doing everything by the book then don’t follow through with it until I insist we do it. And we wonder why people fly through TFRs or land at closed airports or whatever other dumb thing they might do?
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I agree but when I'm making a 10 mile flight just to get cheap fuel and it lists 120 NOTAMS between here and there, I understand why people get lax in their planning. I truthfully don't need to know that the the second runway light on the left on a runway 40 miles away doesn't work.
 
mondtster said:
You could have the best, most sophisticated system in the world and many pilots still won’t read them. So I have to wonder, is there a problem with the system or a problem with the people using the system?

It always amazes me how many pilots willingly violate 91.103. I have given lots of flight instruction for advanced certificates and ratings and have found that many pilots talk a good talk about always getting a preflight briefing and doing everything by the book then don’t follow through with it until I insist we do it. And we wonder why people fly through TFRs or land at closed airports or whatever other dumb thing they might do?
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There are simply too many CYA NOTAMs out there.
 
mondtster said:
You could have the best, most sophisticated system in the world and many pilots still won’t read them. So I have to wonder, is there a problem with the system or a problem with the people using the system?

It always amazes me how many pilots willingly violate 91.103. I have given lots of flight instruction for advanced certificates and ratings and have found that many pilots talk a good talk about always getting a preflight briefing and doing everything by the book then don’t follow through with it until I insist we do it. And we wonder why people fly through TFRs or land at closed airports or whatever other dumb thing they might do?
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91.103 is a big reg...I'd say, with the possibility of VERY small rounding errors, 100% of pilots violate this reg 100% of the time. NOBODY can become familiar with "all available information". Nor would it be a good idea to actually be familiar with "all available information".

Unfortunately one of the byproducts of self-briefing is getting the chaff along with the wheat. There needs to be a way to connect relevant NOTAMs to the operations that apply. If there are two pages of FDC NOTAMs regarding approach procedures, probably only half a page is going to be of use to a pilot on an instrument flight plan, and most of those won't apply because the weather is good enough that they're barely able to log an approach, if at all. Pages of unlighted, 200-foot towers more than 5 miles from the airport of departure or destination is a waste of time to most anybody, VFR or IFR.

So is the problem the system, or the pilots who are so conditioned by the system to not read NOTAMs?
 
MauleSkinner said:
91.103 is a big reg...I'd say, with the possibility of VERY small rounding errors, 100% of pilots violate this reg 100% of the time. NOBODY can become familiar with "all available information". Nor would it be a good idea to actually be familiar with "all available information".

Unfortunately one of the byproducts of self-briefing is getting the chaff along with the wheat. There needs to be a way to connect relevant NOTAMs to the operations that apply. If there are two pages of FDC NOTAMs regarding approach procedures, probably only half a page is going to be of use to a pilot on an instrument flight plan, and most of those won't apply because the weather is good enough that they're barely able to log an approach, if at all. Pages of unlighted, 200-foot towers more than 5 miles from the airport of departure or destination is a waste of time to most anybody, VFR or IFR.

So is the problem the system, or the pilots who are so conditioned by the system to not read NOTAMs?
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I agree.

In no way was I trying to imply that I somehow was able to actually fulfill the requirements of 91.103. My irritation is with the guys who do no preflight briefing whatsoever or don’t do an adequate enough one to even get the basics.

I don’t get the feeling that the guys I’ve worked with who don’t get their briefings would get them no matter how concise they are or if they are in plain English. Perhaps it has to do with the complexity of our current system but it seems to me like they just don’t see the need to do it.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
There are simply too many CYA NOTAMs out there.
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Exactly.

The ATIS at large airports is the same way. Takes a couple of minutes to listen to the whole thing; try doing that without missing anything important on the approach frequency when single pilot.
"Birds in the vicinity of airport" - yeah, really, what a surprise. If it's in the ATIS every single day the same way, then it shouldn't be in the ATIS at all.
Endless list of taxiway closures - ATC assigns my taxi, so do I really have to know?

Same with NOTAMs. It's just too much information of low importance, which in turn makes finding the stuff that actually is important so much harder.
 
I posted this on a different thread. I do read the NOTAMS but it's nearly impossible to separate the one that could kill me from the one that makes no sense at all.

Here's one for today at my home airport - KRYY 02/036 OBST TOWER LGT (ASN 2002-ASO-4642-OE) 335508N0843229W (6.3NM SSE RYY) 1131FT (32FT AGL) OUT OF SERVICE. 20 FEB
12:36 2019 UNTIL 07 MAR 12:35 2019. CREATED: 20 FEB 12:37 2019

Six miles away is a tower that is 32 feet above the ground that doesn't have a light on it. Are you freaking kidding me. If I review NOTAMS for a flight from RYY to FIN, there are literally hundreds of these to wade through.

I personally don't mind the code/abbreviations, it's just the quantity of mostly useless ones that make it so hard to find the ones that matter.

There's a cell phone tower at PUJ that is just off the NW corner of the runway and a few hundred feet tall. If it was unlighted at night, that would be a real risk, but it would be buried in the notices about towers that are lower than some houses..
 
mondtster said:
You could have the best, most sophisticated system in the world and many pilots still won’t read them. So I have to wonder, is there a problem with the system or a problem with the people using the system?
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No, it is a problem with the system that, with an unfiltered, unprioritized, and uncateogorized deluge of information, creates the poor habit pattern of not checking them to the necessary depth.
 
mondtster said:
You could have the best, most sophisticated system in the world and many pilots still won’t read them. So I have to wonder, is there a problem with the system or a problem with the people using the system?
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If the vast majority of people do fine with the existing system, but a few have a problem, it may be with those few. But if problems are a regular occurrence, then there is a problem with the system. One thing you cannot forget: You are dealing with people, and people are not perfect.

And even if you want to take issue with the "NOTAMS are garbage" statement, you can't take issue with the fact that NOTAMS could use some improvements.
 
Hang 4 said:
I posted this on a different thread. I do read the NOTAMS but it's nearly impossible to separate the one that could kill me from the one that makes no sense at all.

Here's one for today at my home airport - KRYY 02/036 OBST TOWER LGT (ASN 2002-ASO-4642-OE) 335508N0843229W (6.3NM SSE RYY) 1131FT (32FT AGL) OUT OF SERVICE. 20 FEB
12:36 2019 UNTIL 07 MAR 12:35 2019. CREATED: 20 FEB 12:37 2019
..
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I’m finalizing my IFR training and planning some long trips for practice. The review of these items is overwhelming. What I don’t understand is why a light missing 32 ft agl matters? Am I going to avoid it now that I’ve reviewed the NOTAM? I’m pretty sure if I’m in a situation to hit it, I’ve got much bigger problems. This is true with so many of these. But I scan them all looking for key words. I can see how after many many hours of this some pilots get a little cursory in their review.


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On a recent flight from Nevada to California, I was warned about volcanic activity in Indonesia. Yup - the system is broken. If that volcano affects my flight in any significant way, there is a good chance that the FAA is no longer in operation. :D
 
As both a pilot, and a NOTAM issuer at my job, I concur completely. Since our airport is a certificated Part 139 commercial airport, there are numerous CYA NOTAMs we are required to issue. Some may be important, but others less than so. Especially adds to our headaches that while we are required to issue them, no one reads them. The only benefit to us other than basic compliance is the CYA. If you land on a closed runway, well it was NOTAMed!

I've always wondered what the FAA thinks pilots are supposed to do with all the tower light NOTAMs. Do they think we sit down with a map and pinpoint each and every one? Even if you did, do you spend your flight trying to find the now unlit tower?

And don't even get me started on TALPA...
 
JOhnH said:
If the vast majority of people do fine with the existing system, but a few have a problem, it may be with those few. But if problems are a regular occurrence, then there is a problem with the system. One thing you cannot forget: You are dealing with people, and people are not perfect.
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Indeed people are not perfect, which reinforces my point. You could have the best crafted system and people will still screw it up or not do what they're supposed to.

JOhnH said:
And even if you want to take issue with the "NOTAMS are garbage" statement, you can't take issue with the fact that NOTAMS could use some improvements.
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To me, the system makes sense and PaulS posted a nice PDF of the structure of the system. I don't think there is really a problem with the NOTAM system itself but there is room for improvement with the people using the system. This includes people who are supposed to be issuing NOTAMs and people who are supposed to be reading them. As one simple example, one of the airports I am very familiar with should have had multiple notams issued this winter for runway and taxiway closures due to snow coverage yet nobody issued them. Most of the pilots flying out of that airport couldn't be bothered with checking to see if there is a notam anyway, so it probably would just be a waste of time to issue. But maybe it would help a transient?

One thing I see is that the way people access notams has changed significantly in recent years, which may be creating part of the problem. In years past a pilot would talk to flight service to get their information which would be automatically filtered, while today many just get the information and parse it themselves. I'm sure the number of notams required for compliance and CYA reasons has had a sharp increase as well.

Problem #1 is to get the pilots to read anything at all...
 
mondtster said:
Problem #1 is to get the pilots to read anything at all...
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But if what you expect them to read is 95% garbage, don't blame the reader for not reading it.
 
Hang 4 said:
But if what you expect them to read is 95% garbage, don't blame the reader for not reading it.
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Garbage or not is a matter of opinion, and it doesn't absolve you from doing what you're supposed to be doing.
 
To put it in perspective, imagine you are getting ready to go on a car ride across town. You are required to review and be familiar with all of the NOTCD (Notice to Car Drivers) For your 5 mile drive across town, you receive 10 pages of sidewalk closures across town, street lights out in a neighboring town, a driveway reflector out of service that is miles from your route. Buried somewhere in all of that is a notice that a stop sign on your route is missing. Think you'll notice?

That is what we are asking pilots to do.
 
I'm still a student pilot, so haven't gotten fully steeped in the way of NOTAMs yet, but it amazes me being in the IT field, that nobody has come up with a system to digest all this information and present it in a meaningful way. It looks like the classic case of too much quantitative info, and not enough qualitative.

We have self-driving cars, smartphones that can listen to human speech and provide back information, etc, etc, etc, and nobody can come up with a system to take all this data and turn it into something easily digestible?

I wonder if it's not so much an issue with technology, but liability? Maybe somebody could apply some intelligence to this, but heaven forbid if there was a bug and some data got misinterpreted or not presented as relevant enough, and an accident happened, the provider of the info would be sued to hell and back?
 
kkoran said:
???? Relevance to the topic?
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Go read the original post. It references an article about a NOTAM regarding a closed runway and an incursion with an airplane that almost landed on a taxiway. Feeling good now? ;)
 
I would like to meet the person who actually authors the NOTAMs. That would make for a great YouTube video :)

I feel like its this one guy who knows what he's doing, means well and is about to retire after 66yrs of doing the same thing. He probably still types them on a typewriter and then "they" use a government contracted $72,345,212 specialized flatbed scanner (from HP) and scan them in. Plus, over the years, he now has a team of 5 govt lawyers sitting around him telling what he can and can't say. When they aren't busy on NOTAM's they are reviewing rules of engagement for our troops. That's why every time I fly I have read NOTAMs that I think are telling me to not fly over North Korea...but I can't be sure. Here's the odd part...I really had no plans of flying over North Korea...but it kinda makes me want to now after they wrote 30 lines of codes telling me to stay away.

Can we get @SixPapaCharlie to make a video on that guy :)
 
mondtster said:
Garbage or not is a matter of opinion, and it doesn't absolve you from doing what you're supposed to be doing.
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I don't think I've ever read a NOTAM. They all look like gibberish to me. I even read that FAA slideshow, and the main thing I got out of it is that the gibberish is baked in. Instead of trying to decipher the undecipherable, I call FSS.
 
Lindberg said:
I don't think I've ever read a NOTAM. They all look like gibberish to me. I even read that FAA slideshow, and the main thing I got out of it is that the gibberish is baked in. Instead of trying to decipher the undecipherable, I call FSS.
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If more people would do it your way (call FSS) I think there wouldn’t be as many discussions and opinions like those expressed in this thread. But for some reason, people don’t want to talk to people who are there to help them out. Not sure why that is.
 
It’s for the same reasons people spend 30 minutes texting what could’ve been a five minute phone call—personal interaction is a dying art!
 
Because digitization has made the presentation of quality information quicker and easier than ever.

I don't need to wade through 2 minutes of pressing buttons on my phone listening to automated prompts to get relevant information. Or rather, I shouldn't need to.

Please tell me what the point of notifying me about a tower 32 ft AGL 7 miles from my route is. If you can legitimately justify the existence of that NOTAM, I'm sure many of us will how to your opinion.
 
ircphoenix said:
Because digitization has made the presentation of quality information quicker and easier than ever.
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For that matter, cut out all of the stupid acronyms and cryptic abbreviations. This is 2019, and computers can easily substitute the actual terms. Make it a config option, at least. It would be criminally easy for software to substitute the full wording for "XYZ" or whatever.

Please tell me what the point of notifying me about a tower 32 ft AGL 7 miles from my route is. If you can legitimately justify the existence of that NOTAM, I'm sure many of us will how to your opinion.
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Speaking as the guy who has to file NOTAMs for our 5 broadcast facilities, you're right, it's CYA -- but you're C'ing your A against an eye-watering fine from the FCC or FAA (or BOTH) if you DON'T report that one light being out. On a strobed tower, you have to report it within 15 minutes.

In the case of your 32' tower, if I'm reading that NOTAM text right, it's atop a tall hill. The FAA probably says it needs to be NOTAMed on "any failure," so, by golly, you'd better get a NOTAM or get hammered.

I have to report if one single side obstruction light goes out. And yet, one one of my taller towers (700', 1000AGL on Red Mountain in Birmingham), now has a waiver to turn OFF the side lights. Huzzah! Without that waiver, we'd be looking at a horrible fine if I didn't file a NOTAM. For one inky-dinky little side obstruction light.

Another case in point: our 1,300' tower near Cullman, AL, has been under a NOTAM for a very long time. We'd been arguing with the lighting vendor and we're finally (hopefully!) about to get it fixed. All of my side strobes, the big high-intensity lights that you might actually see, were fine and were in sync. 80' above those big flashheads, at the very tippy-top, our medium-intensity AOL strobe was flashing fine, but was out of sync.

That's technically a violation of rules, so we're still under a NOTAM. We've replaced the entire top fixture twice with no success (whence our arguments with the vendor). (Yadda, yadda, I won't bore you with the story.)

So, for my part in adding to the jumble, I most humbly apologize. ;)
 
It would seem like the merging of (L) NOTAMs with (D) NOTAMs was kind of stupid in retrospect?
 
Elevating the trivial to the essential trivializes it all.

Saying we're "supposed to" is nonsense - you could make a rule we must count all the rivets on the plane before flight, and we'd be rule breakers if we didn't tally 'em up. But the rule would be only slightly dumber than the NOTAM process.

It's broken, antiquated, obscure, and has been for decades.
 
For my first real XC back in 2007, I went to DUATS. My flight was essentially across most of the width of KY, east to west, then home a few days later. The weather output gave me details from Miami to Boston and west to Chicago. There were NOTAMs from every airport, VOR and antenna within 150nm of my route of flight.

The actual distance was just over 300nm. Looking up codes, I had information that covered everything in a line more than 200nm wide and well over 500 nm long. Guess they were covering themselves in case I got confused and flew an hour east before realizing that central KY is pretty flat but those bumpy things down there are the mountains of WV . . . . Before I pasted it all into Word and started deleting, it was 46 pages of ALL CAP ABBRVS THAT ARE CNFSG AND OBSC.

As for my need for being told anything about a light less than 1000' above field elevation and more than about 3nm from my destination, if I'm ever that low that far out it's an emergency and the paper with the NOTAMs on it is going to be in the backseat while I concentrate on flying the plane, because it has problems and I'm ignoring everything not on the panel or out the windshield.

The NOTAM system is badly broken, and has been for a long time. @Stephen Poole just clarified exctly how broken. Sure, there are regs requiring him to file all of that worthless garbage. Our question here is WHY??? It does no good for anyone, and the plethora of junk information obscures the few things that we need to know. Like a closed runway buried on p.8 of 26 pages of NOTAMs . . .
 
Hank S said:
As for my need for being told anything about a light less than 1000' above field elevation and more than about 3nm from my destination, if I'm ever that low that far out it's an emergency and the paper with the NOTAMs on it is going to be in the backseat while I concentrate on flying the plane, because it has problems and I'm ignoring everything not on the panel or out the windshield.
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So... Because the light at 950', 3nm away from your destination is irrelevant to you, does that also make it irrelevant to the cub that's out there flying low and slow? Perhaps NOTAMs should only contain relevant information for commercial traffic?

How does it go? You can please some of the people, some of the time...
 
CharlieK said:
So... Because the light at 950', 3nm away from your destination is irrelevant to you, does that also make it irrelevant to the cub that's out there flying low and slow? Perhaps NOTAMs should only contain relevant information for commercial traffic?

How does it go? You can please some of the people, some of the time...
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That's not the point, it's information overload. Even for the Cub. (Especially for the Cub. I think you've got it backwards.)

Maybe third-party software in the pilot's hand could help, but we're back to "CYA." I don't know if a vendor wants to accept liability if there's an accident. "My FourFlogger app didn't warn me about that unlit smoke stack!"
 
Hank S said:
The NOTAM system is badly broken, and has been for a long time. @Stephen Poole just clarified exctly how broken. Sure, there are regs requiring him to file all of that worthless garbage. Our question here is WHY??? It does no good for anyone, and the plethora of junk information obscures the few things that we need to know. Like a closed runway buried on p.8 of 26 pages of NOTAMs . . .
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And I 100% agree with that. But as I learn more about this pilot thingie, I'm tellin' ya', this is Deja Vu all over again for me. The FAA acts like the Bad Old FCC did when I first started in radio, where you had to log everything, each piece of equipment had to be type-accepted, and yadda, yadda.

Look: I'd never deliberately put anyone at risk. I do have a conscience. But there's a world of difference between a tower that's completely dark (especially if it's tall enough to matter) and one with a single light out. That just adds to the jumble.
 
I think it would be better if, just like a METAR, it can be easily translated into plain text. Can I read a metar in raw format? Sure, but it generally only has 10-15 components, and it is 99% in a finite format with known abbreviations. NOTAMs are pages long, and use map coordinates to designate location, which few people can decipher in raw format. Having it be converted by software into plain text, along with location mapping on a sectional/WAC/whatev would be helpful. Even more helpful would be a system that, like SIGMETs/AIRMETs, could be stratified so that you could filter the noise out on the map. Don't care about any NOTAM more than 10 miles on either side of your route? Un-check a box. Don't care about obstruction light? Un-check a box. Point is, you should be able to filter the information based on your flight profile and user-determined parameters so that only the relevant information is displayed, instead of the information overload we currently get.
 
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