We Need to fix NOTAMS
Intro
The NOTAM system is broken. What started out as a way to inform pilots of pertinent information about closures, operational changes, and other information has devolved into a free-for-all to publish largely irrelevant noise. James Albright has a good article that catalogues many of these challenges, and in the case of MH17, some of their tragic consequences. He has some good suggestions for fixing the system. Beyond those, there are further actions that publishers, curators, and pilots can take within their own specific domains to improve the situation. As of September 2025, it looks like some efforts are underway to address it, so we should weigh in now with our feedback to make it better.
For Publishers
Show me a picture of what I'm looking for and it'll be easier to spot.
If you’re an entity that publishes NOTAMs, please consider making the following changes to improve the relevance and usefulness to pilots:
- Usefulness: consider how helpful some piece of information will be using an established model that tracks risks and consequences. If there’s a single burned-out bulb on a taxiway edge light somewhere, we probably don’t need to know about it. Save the time writing a “TWY LIGHT U/S” NOTAM and instead invest that effort in sending someone out with a new bulb to fix the problem. If all the lights for the entire taxiway are out, that could cause another AC759, so go ahead and publish that to let us know.
- Helpful explanations: I often see NOTAMS like “TWY A MARKINGS NOT STD,” which leaves me wondering, “In what capacity is it non-standard? Did they run out of yellow paint and do it in pink? Is there a tire smudge on the paint? Did someone put the template down a few degrees off standard and now it counts as ‘non-standard?’” Similar story with “IRREGULAR SFC:” is that a foot-deep pothole, or a 1-inch lip on an expansion joint? Don’t just tell us what it isn’t (standard), tell us what we should be looking for.
- A picture is worth a thousand words: in the era of digital photography and cheap storage, there’s no reason not to share information in picture form. If you give me a picture of that off-kilter pink taxiway marking with a tire smudge, I’ll know what to look for.
- Filtering options by audience: make sure your NOTAM interface has an easy way to filter crane NOTAMs (e.g. within a certain range and direction of a selected runway set), low-level MOAs and MTRs (e.g. only within 20 nm of an en-route airport with a >6000 ft runway), etc.
For Curators
The crane cone: tell us about what's in the red zones, not halfway across town.
If you’re someone who works in dispatch, an in-house software team, or for a commercial software vendor (e.g. ForeFlight, Garmin) that shares NOTAM information, here are some ideas that can help your pilots cut through the fluff and see the important stuff:
- The “crane cone:” Many airports (e.g. SFO) have oodles of crane NOTAMs, most of which are irrelevant to fixed-wing pilots. There’s a narrow path, a few degrees either side of centerline, where we plan to operate. If there’s a crane that infringes on the TERPS OCS within that space, I’d want to know about it (red crane in drawing). Everything that’s half a mile off centerline (green cranes)? Nope. If you’re that far off course, you’d better be going around instead of reading crane NOTAMs. That said, some drone or helicopter pilots doing low-level ops might care about ones further afield, so depending on the operation, allow a configurable sensitivity to the “crane cone.”
- To the extent that publishers drop the ball, curate airspace NOTAMs based on flight plan inputs to remove low-level MOAs, MTRs, etc.
- Make graphical chart overlays: places like Denver often have a bunch of taxiway closures that affect short segments. Sifting through all the “L CLSD BETW BS and AN” and marking it on charts takes forever. Having a responsive chart with red Xs or boxes over the affected segments would make this clearer in less time. Similarly, adjustments to feeder routes or mins on approach charts could be added as an inline layer to reduce the likelihood of them getting buried. It should be relatively simple to have an AI system come up with a draft and then let a human sanity check it before pushing to production. For something like Garmin’s new SmartCharts, it could be baked into the procedure selection flow.
A smart chart overlay like this could show you the closures and NOTAMed changes to mins directly on the chart.
For Pilots
We all know that old joke: “The difference between a pilot and a jet engine is the jet stops whining when you get to the gate.” While it can be cathartic at times to gripe about NOTAMs, we should endeavor to be a bigger part of the solution. Here are some things we ought to do:
- Write to our NOTAM publishers (e.g. the FAA) and industry organizations like AOPA who are lobbying for changes. Share this article, Albright’s article, and any other good ones to draw more attention to the topic.
- If publishers remain slow, advocate internally for software filtering tools like the crane cone or smart annotations. Send me any good implementations you find so I can add it here as a recommended tool.
- If you make a mistake because you missed an important NOTAM in a haystack, submit a NASA, ASAP, or other regionally-appropriate report, highlighting your event and the issues mentioned above. As that stack of reports gets deeper, safety teams will be forced to pay more attention and apply more pressure to getting it fixed.