Notams down?

J

JOhnH

Touchdown! Greaser!
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I received the following email from the airport manager of an airport we have visited a few times:


  • Please be advised that the FAA has notified us that the Notice to Airmen System is currently down. Check NOTAMS prior to your next flight and if it has not been restored call ahead to your destination to make sure there are no issues.
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From the emails I have received, they have had some type of big database failure that has taken down, among other things, the NOTAM system. Jokes aside, this is a mission critical issue, as there is no way for airports and others to disseminate safety important NOTAMs to pilots and ATC.
 
I’m seeing current and past NOTAMs on F Flight
 
NorthEast Ohio said:
https://notams.aim.faa.gov/notamSearch/nsapp.html#/

The Notam search works for me
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It took 3 tries for me to get the page to come up. The first two times I just got a big white screen.
Then when it did come up, I got this:

Welcome to NOTAM Search
This site is informational in nature and is designed to assist pilots and aircrews for flight planning and familiarization.It may be used in conjunction with other pre-flight information sources needed to satisfy all the requirements of 14 CFR 91.103 and is not to be considered as a sole source of information to meet all pre-flight action.

Due to system processing delays, recently entered NOTAMs may not be displayed.
(I highlighted the red part).
 
Rgbeard said:
This seems bigger than the SWA meltdown.
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You might be right. And I thought the whole problem with the NOTAM system was its awful readability. As it turns out, there’s a bigger problem that they can’t even keep the system working, unreadable or not.
 
Today I learned that the definition for NOTAM has apparently changed from "Notice to Airmen" to "Notice to Air Missions". I must have missed that NOTAM.
 
Jim_R said:
Today I learned that the definition for NOTAM has apparently changed from "Notice to Airmen" to "Notice to Air Missions". I must have missed that NOTAM.
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Ha, just heard that on the news. Always learning.
 
The important thing here is that they changed it to "notice to air missions" so that no one who can't get their NOTAMs feels discriminated against.
 
The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Notice To Air Missions (NOTAM) system has failed for the first time in history.
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How can it fail when it was never working in the first place?

How can I possibly make my $100 pancake run next Saturday if the Department of State can't advise me whether overflights of Kenya and Afghanistan are recommended or not?
 
Any thoughts if this snafu will drive a modernization of the NOTAM system and how the information is conveyed?
 
G-Man said:
Any thoughts if this snafu will drive a modernization of the NOTAM system and how the information is conveyed?
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I can tell you, the NOTAM system from a technological standpoint has been getting modernized over the last 10 years or so. As late as 2012, we as an airport still had to pick up the phone and call FSS to issue and cancel NOTAMs. It could take 30+ minutes before that NOTAM would be validated and transmitted. Since then, the process has been updated where we can now log-in directly over the internet and issue the NOTAMs. The latency between submission and distribution is now seconds, where it was minutes or longer.

That being said, the problem with the NOTAM system is the information that is required. The NOTAM system has become the CYA for the FAA, the pages of fine print at the end of a contract, so everyone can wash their hands and say, well the pilot had the information available to them. The FAA requires airports to do the same, any deviation from the standard must be reported via NOTAM. A sign unlit, NOTAM it. A rut in the grass next to the taxiway, NOTAM it. Windsock is ripped, NOTAM it. Combined with the tower unlit NOTAMs, ambiguous airspace NOTAMs, and ATC NOTAMs, it makes for a system full of garbage that pilots are expected to pick through to find the gold. Just landed on a closed runway? Well it was NOTAMed, on page 24 of 85 of the NOTAMs for the flight.

Fixing that is not going to be technological, and has nothing to do with this system wide outage. From the constant email updates we've had overnight, this failure was due to some type of database failure, which has required them to basically rebuild the database overnight and required time to test and validate its operation. Airports were notified this morning that all NOTAMs issued since 1800Z yesterday had been purged and need to be re-issued.
 
midwestpa24 said:
That being said, the problem with the NOTAM system is the information that is required. The NOTAM system has become the CYA for the FAA, the pages of fine print at the end of a contract, so everyone can wash their hands and say, well the pilot had the information available to them.
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True.

But they could at least be made more readable. Using both upper and lower case letters, paragraph separation, and some plain English would help a lot, instead of having a WALL OF ALL-CAP TEXT MUCH OF WHICH IS LEGALESE JARGON AND ACRONYMS.

Implementing some topical headings would also make them capable of being filtered. When I’m a VFR pilot flying a VFR plane, I don’t need the briefing to be cluttered with a ton of ILS NOTAMs and instrument approach info.

And those things shouldn’t be hard to fix.
 
Half Fast said:
True.

But they could at least be made more readable. Using both upper and lower case letters, paragraph separation, and some plain English would help a lot, instead of having a WALL OF ALL-CAP TEXT MUCH OF WHICH IS LEGALESE JARGON AND ACRONYMS.

Implementing some topical headings would also make them capable of being filtered. When I’m a VFR pilot flying a VFR plane, I don’t need the briefing to be cluttered with a ton of ILS NOTAMs and instrument approach info.

And those things shouldn’t be hard to fix.
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I agree with you 100% on the all caps, and mostly on the acronyms. I will say on the acronyms and abbreviations, I recall there being a push for METARs years ago to go plain English, and quite a few pilots actually discovered it was quicker to read the coded METAR than to take in the plain English version. Learning the system is a little difficult, but once you understand the shorthand your brain can decode it faster.

As to the headings, that was implemented several years ago. All NOTAMs start with one of several keywords or acronyms, AD, RWY, TWY, APRON, COM, NAV, OBST, or SVC. Most sources for searching NOTAMs should allow for sorting by facility and keyword. It helps sort through the chaff a little, although there is still room for improvement. Honestly Foreflight seems to do this best, picking up on AD, RWY, and TWY NOTAMs and de-emphasizing the OBST, COM, NAV NOTAMs.
 
DB failure? Nope, an IT processes failure. Things break all the time - do some DR testing, some fail-over design, put some effort into recovery, have some testing rigor. I imagine they had some of that, since they appeared to recover relatively quickly - but the NOTAM system is a gross failure even when it's working - it elevates the trivial to the essential, and so obscures the important info. As many here have said, it's (mostly) a CYA system for the FAA, and a real danger to aviation.

This pig was obsolete in design and presentation 30 years ago...
 
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