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62 pages of Notams for a 70 NM cross country flight???

Probably, yes, though the UK site goes back many more years. It used to be famous under the ais.org.uk URL.

Today, few UK pilots use it, due to the long list of (mostly) garbage which it churns out – even for a narrow route briefing. I am OK with it because I rarely fly VFR in the UK now but most use either notams in their tablet app (which are probably OK for local flying, since software for turning coordinate lists into a polygon is unreliable, so “the team” tends to fix up only stuff affecting popular watering hole runs) or they use a site like https://notaminfo.com/ukmap. In fact we have a thread on it here

Ultimately all worldwide notams come from the same source. Historically it was fed via the AFTN. For example the AFPEX tool (being a direct AFTN interface) could be used to file a notam, if your AFPEX account was enabled for that. But there is more than one database maintained. The NOAA one is popular, but a lot of European notams are not distributed to America!! Hence this and the IPPC one which I believe is a mirror (or a gateway to) the Eurocontrol database. I don’t think the IPPC database has a (free) direct public gateway to it.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

It’s probably as same as the one at Eurocontrol https://www.ead.eurocontrol.int/fwf-eadbasic/restricted/user/ino/brief_route.faces

which results with report like this one

LDZA LDVA, Croatia

For both enroute and airport notams UK pilots use

http://www.nats-uk.ead-it.com/public/index.php.html

You have to register and login for each use (allegedly because it logs each briefing so you can defend yourself legally ) but the reg is free.

Select Notam / Narrow Route Brief.

The only bits you need to fill in are in this portion

It works worldwide.

Then, as usual, there is a knack for skipping the crap. Nowadays everybody who flies a kite is generating a notam… but for most routes it works well enough.

The software is a bit dodgy. It fails to recognise some navaids, notably some 2-letter NDB names, and as per ICAO flight plan spec you cannot use airport identifiers as waypoints enroute.

Re the above Ukraine notam, any “TRA” notam is deadly serious, so whether the coordinates are unreadable or whatever doesn’t matter; one must work it out. In the UK, busting one of the airshow TRAs is a £5k+ fine and it has been imposed – one Belgian pilot got it a few years ago. The airline’s ops department was negligent if they could not plot that shape. The pilots don’t need to do it; they get this in a briefing pack.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Canuck wrote:

I mean, who actually is flying at 200 feet and needs to know about all those building cranes

Has to do with getting “legally clean and shinny”, I don’t fly at 200ft but say if I do for some reason, I hit an obstacle and survived
The next thing, I will find a good lawyer to come after the guy who printed that VFR map, the AD operator, aircraft window manufacturer and my Optician/AME

So Notams is a easy way for non-pilots to get off the hook, including some very tiny trivial items

One of my syndicate members used to print both AutoRouter+SkyDemon brief packages and leave them in the aircraft even for a short 40min flight to L2K, I started to raise serious questions on WnB and ecology

Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

The system clearly needs to be revamped. The hidden sleeper notams are particularly scary. I found this summary local copy incredibly entertaining, but terrifying because most of it is true. I mean, who actually is flying at 200 feet and needs to know about all those building cranes. Probably best to look out the window.

Sans aircraft at the moment :-(, United Kingdom

Airborne_Again wrote:

E.g. NORM disagreed that a NOTAM which raised IAP minima was critical.

Well, as I had lately (in July), a NOTAM dated March that raises IAP minima is non-critical. The raised minima will already be on my updated approach plates. It is kinda-maybe useful as a nudge for “don’t use that old printed plate that you didn’t update in six months” and for “Jeppesen and Lido, update your plates”, but not critical to (I hope!) most pilots’ workflow.

ELLX

NORM is very early stage.

ESME, ESMS

Dimme wrote:

It takes all NOTAMs for an airport and passes them though NORM to figure out how critical they are. It’s not always accurate and it is very slow. Let me know if you want access.

NORM is a good idea, but from the samples on the page I’m no so sure about how it currently works. E.g. NORM disagreed that a NOTAM which raised IAP minima was critical.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

And today I see a classic NOTAM for France:

Covers all france. ie huge influence. Refers to a AIP-SUP (199/19) which basicly lists every single CTR in France with coordinates and activation times. ie its replacing the current AIP. Now yes, I guess this needs to NOTAMed but its 20 odd pages of coordinates and times….not a hope in hell Im digesting/understanding this NOTAM!!

Yes please!

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland
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