Looks like it’s been fixed:
FAA NOTAM System Outage
111–120 of 230 posts
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#112I've got a trip to take in a couple weeks. I have a choice: 4 hours of driving followed by two regional flights. Or just forget flying and drive 16 hours point to point. Between today's issues and all the headaches at YVR over the holidays, driving 16 hours seems more comfortable and less stressful than rolling the dice with regional airline travel.
I would rather be stuck driving my car for a day than spend a day sleeping on the floor of an airport lobby.
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#113REALLY IMPORTANT NOTAMS tend to alert pilots to RESTRICTED AIRSPACE or AREAS OF UNUSUAL AIR OPERATIONS. You can't fly anywhere near the President of the United States, the movements of which can change from day to day. We get NOTAMS about military aircraft operations; often military airspace which is usually permitted may be shut down for a week or so. Wildfire tanker operations or other natural emergencies can close…
They are also for notifying pilots of potential caution areas.
I used to operate a 550+ meter tower and when I had a tower light out, I had to file a NOTAM.
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be a silly question, but is that a NOTAM saying that NOTAM system is down? How does it get out?
The website and the system that gets it out to all the planes are related but not the same.
With all the hate in HN regarding SOA, here’s a great example of adding resilience by separating concerns at a systems level.
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#115They're resuming operations despite "still searching for a cause." Comforting.
You've never rebooted a computer to get it working again, without immediately knowing why it crashed?
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a flight planning mystery. Lets say you are not flying to, but flying by, my hometown airport. You decide arbitrarily to use it as a divert in case of awful weather or engine trouble enroute or you just want a bathroom break (this is more of a Cessna 172 airport than a 747 airport) I found a cached list of nine current NOTAMs for my home airport. Because its always better to overinform than to underinform, until…
Is someone who is planning multiple divert airports seriously expected to retain all of that information and recall it in the case of an emergency? Seems like 10% of that info might be kinda useful to know and 90% of it is “BY FLYING IN OUR DIRECTION YOU AGREED TO ACCEPT …”
You're expected to have the information with you. Having read it before flight also increase the chance that it jogs your memory; "closest airport is CVG, didn't I see something... ah, yes, nuked last week, let's go to Columbus".
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be a silly question, but is that a NOTAM saying that NOTAM system is down? How does it get out?
Reminds me of that screenshot of a windows popup unable to display an error.
I will never forget trying to set up a printer on a linux desktop 20+ years ago: tried to print a diagnostic/test page. All that printed was a single line of text: "Unable to connect to printer."
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#118Fun stuff about NOTAMs: https://fixingnotams.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Field-Gu...
Fun but deadly. They’re not wrong about the absolute avalanche of irrelevant data that will be used to show you “you should have known” - hence the proliferation of “interpretation” services.
But it’s up to airline how they present NOTAMS to the pilot in the briefing package.
They can (and do) use geolocation present in some (many) NOTAMs to filter them out. For example do not show the NOTAM just because the flight path intersects with the airspace. They can do even better - consider not only location but also altitude range, the best flight planning systems can consider also estimated time of arrival of the plane near the location of the NOTAM and filter out those which are not yet valid or those which are expired (the validity range usually present in each message).
This makes the problem of including the NOTAM a 4-dimensional - geographical location 2 dimensions, altitude 1 dimension and a time. Not the easiest to solve, but solvable. Of course for every dimension margins can be applied to accommodate re-routes or departure delays, or ATC commands.
There is no written in stone standard of how to present NOTAMS. Newer may be displayed at the beginning, etc Not to say that they can (and do) separate airfield and airspace messages to segment the large set onto meaningful subsets.
I mean there ways to make sure important information is not lost and less important available if needed.
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#119I've got a trip to take in a couple weeks. I have a choice: 4 hours of driving followed by two regional flights. Or just forget flying and drive 16 hours point to point. Between today's issues and all the headaches at YVR over the holidays, driving 16 hours seems more comfortable and less stressful than rolling the dice with regional airline travel. I would rather be stuck driving my car for a day than spend a day sl…
Depending on the length of the stay and whether you need a car, I'd do the road trip in a heartbeat.
Re: FAA NOTAM System Outage
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun but deadly. They’re not wrong about the absolute avalanche of irrelevant data that will be used to show you “you should have known” - hence the proliferation of “interpretation” services.
But it’s up to airline how they present NOTAMS to the pilot in the briefing package. They can (and do) use geolocation present in some (many) NOTAMs to filter them out. For example do not show the NOTAM just because the flight path intersects with the airspace. They can do even better - consider not only location but also altitude range, the best flight planning systems can consider also estimated time of arrival of…
Airlines aren't the only things doing "air missions" - there is software that filters out much of it, but it IS quite archaic (similar to how the "official weather" notifications are set out).
Look at the Ukraine one for a pretty scary example.