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NOTAM statistics fun

There was a case of a pilot in France who landed on an aerodrome that was declared closed by NOTAM. He defended himself saying that there was no such NOTAM on the site (or app) that he had used for his briefing. It turned out that the NOTAM had been marked as “local” by the authorities and thus not disseminated internationally, and the site he used didn’t get their NOTAMs from the SIA. Unfortunately I don’t know if it was based on Eurocontrol or the FAA as a source, or some other national system. The DGAC says that it is the fault of the pilot because the official source for NOTAMs in France is the SIA.

When did this happen?

There used to be a famous situation whereby for countless years France used to refuse to supply the UK with certain airfield notams, on the basis that no pilot could legally fly to these airfields direct to/from the UK. They were called “Series D” notams.

This situation resulted in incomplete notam briefings, because most UK pilots used the NATS facility (formerly ais.org.uk).

No other European country used to do this.

When Eurocontrol took over notams, France had to stop witholding those notams, so now the NATS briefings (which are obtained from the Eurocontrol database) should be complete.

The pretence that everybody should use each country’s official briefing facility is just plain arrogant. There are so many “national official” websites, but flying is an international activity. Airlines have been getting their notam feeds from the USA anyway, for many years (as well as using US AFTN gateways for flight plan filing).

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

RSFTA is French for AFTN. Unbelievable, that really doesn’t make life any simpler

Since the column “Nat.” is empty, France seems to have abandoned the old system, where certain NOTAM series were not promulgated internationally.

This seems also to be confirmed by this AIC: http://www.dircam.air.defense.gouv.fr/images/stories/Doc/dossier_aicfrancea_AIC_A_2014_20_FR.pdf

Edit: English version here, not an official site: http://notamapps.com.87-106-142-154.interneers.com/images/documents/France_AIC_A_20-2014_NOTAM_series_reorganisation.pdf

So the problem that this pilot ran into should no longer happen in France in any case.

Last Edited by Rwy20 at 08 Aug 16:33

That’s the NOTAM series (denoted by a letter from A-Z) that are for national distribution only. They are still contained from what we see.

select count(*) from notams where nof='EFHK' and Series='K';
 count 
-------
   242
(1 row)

select count(*) from notams where nof='LIIA' and Series='C';
 count 
-------
    95
(1 row)

achimha wrote:

Even the non migrated countries have an agreement with Eurocontrol that ensures the complete and timely delivery of NOTAMs so you are safe there.

Do you know the meaning of the “Int.” and “Nat.” columns on that page? France for example has no entry in the “Nat.” column. Does that mean anything?

atmilatos wrote:

Is this free of charge?

No, EAD is commercial. The API offering is called MyEAD. The learning curve is quite steep, it suffers badly from unnecessary over complexity. The modern, slim and extremely well designed and documented IFPS interfaces are in stark contrast to that.

Rwy20 wrote:

I wonder if this notion of “national” and “international” also applies to Eurocontrol, i.e. some NOTAMs may not even make their way to Eurocontrol?

On the Eurocontrol INO status page you can see the status of each country. There are two types of countries (just like for the AIP): migrated and non migrated clients. The non migrated clients have their own systems and interface to Eurocontrol. The migrated clients have write access to the Eurocontrol system and maintain it themselves. Even the non migrated countries have an agreement with Eurocontrol that ensures the complete and timely delivery of NOTAMs so you are safe there.

Last Edited by achimha at 08 Aug 14:43

achimha wrote:

We license the data from Eurocontrol EAD

Is this free of charge?

LGMT (Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece), Greece

achimha wrote:

Unfortunately not useable for our purpose as not all European NOTAMs are sent across the pond

There was a case of a pilot in France who landed on an aerodrome that was declared closed by NOTAM. He defended himself saying that there was no such NOTAM on the site (or app) that he had used for his briefing. It turned out that the NOTAM had been marked as “local” by the authorities and thus not disseminated internationally, and the site he used didn’t get their NOTAMs from the SIA. Unfortunately I don’t know if it was based on Eurocontrol or the FAA as a source, or some other national system. The DGAC says that it is the fault of the pilot because the official source for NOTAMs in France is the SIA.

I wonder if this notion of “national” and “international” also applies to Eurocontrol, i.e. some NOTAMs may not even make their way to Eurocontrol?

Jan_Olieslagers wrote:

I wonder about the database, though: could you get direct (even if likely enough read-only) access to Eurocontrol’s database? Or were you allowed to set up a replica of it? Or do you concoct your own database from the various European CAA’s?

We license the data from Eurocontrol EAD and keep a local replica for the next version of autorouter’s NOTAM lookup code. Until now we let Eurocontrol choose the NOTAMs for the flight plan (the original idea was to shift responsibility in case an important NOTAM got left out) but it turns out the EAD interfaces for this are not reliable. We literally found and reported dozens of bugs and eventually came to the conclusion that it is un-fixable due to some design shortcomings in EAD. Now that we have that large database, nothing stops me from having a bit of SQL fun

I believe there is a way to get the NOTAM database from the FAA free of charge. Unfortunately not useable for our purpose as not all European NOTAMs are sent across the pond and briefing generated using the FAA database would be incomplete (while adding a lot of US Air Force stuff for airports where they have a presence).

Great thread – thanks Achim

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