AIN writer

Julie Boatman

<p>The notices from the county planning commission went up first. I registered the white posters with bold lettering on my morning stroll just as my neighbor walked up to me to tell me what they meant.</p>
<p>“They wanted to put in a new cell tower,” she said as she gestured up the hill to the crest of a pasture that often held a passel of dairy cows. What she didn’t say: We hope everyone’s okay with all this new technology rising up in the midst of farm fields held by Mennonite families for the past nine generations.</p>
<p>What she didn’t know was that I took one look at that tower site and thought, “Dang, that is right under the ILS approach course to 27. I wonder when the notam’s going to pop up?”</p>
<h2>Why a Notam Matters</h2>
<p>Pilots must access and understand the notams relevant to their planned flight per 14 CFR 91.103, covering preflight action. That hasn’t changed in a long time.</p>
<p>But the system through which you obtain those notams is undergoing a serious overhaul—and for most pilots, it’s about time. We have collectively spent countless hours poring through textual piles of spurious entries to find the one needle in the haystack that could prick us sharply if we missed it. Runway and taxiway closures, lighting outages, and new towers spring up like mushrooms after the rain—and change the instrument approach procedure or departure procedure we might file and follow, or the very airport to which we’ll fly.</p>
<p>The sheer volume of data is immense, and it continues to accelerate. Cracks in the existing distribution and dissemination architecture have shown in recent years, with the most top-of-mind one occurring on Jan. 10, 2023, when contract personnel unintentionally deleted files “while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database,” according to an FAA statement nine days later. “The agency has so far found no evidence of a cyber-attack or malicious intent.” It appears to have been a simple error, relatively speaking.</p>
<p>For those who were working in ATC, in dispatch operations, and on the flight deck that day, the situation took just about everyone off guard. The underlying system had been deemed adequate but, in the wake of the coding problem, quickly became overwhelmed—like a 5-gallon bucket trying to capture Niagara Falls. Stakeholders such as FAA operations personnel had no trouble putting info into the system, but soon airlines, ARTCC facilities, and other ATC “customers” began calling in, reporting info going into the system but not coming out.</p>
<p>Anyone who flies or schedules aircraft using an ops spec understands immediately the problem: Aircraft by SOP are not allowed to fly if the crew doesn’t have current runway and other airport information delivered by the notam system. While there was a ground stop, those operators had, for the most part, already stopped dispatching flights in the absence of the notam information.</p>
<p>It was like “a rolling earthquake that would not end,” according to one operations person I spoke with off the record.</p>
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<h2>Time To Get Modern</h2>
<p>The notam system has been slated for upgrading for several years, and now we’re beginning to see the fruit of that effort.</p>
<p>On Sept. 29, 2025, the new Notam Management Service went into an initial deployment,&nbsp; distributing notams to “early adopter stakeholders,” according to the FAA. “This initial deployment establishes the framework for the new service, enabling testing and validation with early user adopters. The full transition to the new single-source notam service is on track for late spring 2026.”</p>
<p>The new system hosts a modern, more streamlined interface, according to the agency, enabling near-real-time data exchange and active collaboration between stakeholders in the National Airspace System. It’s hosted in the cloud, and “has a scalable and resilient architecture designed for high availability.”</p>
<p>You can also quickly find the latest notams directly pertaining to your airport or route using&nbsp;<a href="http://faa.gov">FAA.gov</a>’s new NotamSearch functionality.</p>
<p>The FAA still has under development the Candidate Notam Contingency System, which is intended to kick in during a major outage of the notam system—such as that experienced in January 2023. It will work by allowing the “FAA and its stakeholders to maintain an accurate picture of the NAS while the primary notam system is returned to service by allowing authorized FAA and Flight Service personnel to issue ‘candidate’ notams—i.e., notams not yet entered into the official notam system and thus missing notam numbers—and distribute them to the public using a standalone website,” according to the agency. When the system is operating normally, a message indicating this is displayed on&nbsp;<a href="http://notambackup.faa.gov">Notambackup.faa.gov</a>.</p>
<h2>Technology Meets the Moment</h2>
<p>Understanding how a notam comes into being and how the system has changed can help you determine the best way to leverage those dynamics so that you minimize your search time and maximize time left for other preflight tasks—not to mention reducing the hazards instigated by not knowing a critical detail pertaining to your flight or operations.</p>
<p>The notam’s originator, who enters the notam data, “is responsible for classifying, formatting, canceling, and informing the controlling facility and other facilities/offices affected by the aid, service, or hazard contained in the new notam.” The air route traffic control centers (ARTCCs) are responsible for forwarding flight data center and special activity airspace (SAA) notam information to the affected terminal facilities. In the case of our example cell-tower obstacle, notam near KHGR in Hagerstown, Maryland, the Washington ARTCC Flight Data Unit is the official coordinating entity.</p>
<p>Special rules also apply to TFRs that are presidential in nature, are special security instructions, invoke emergency air traffic rules, or pertain to military operations.</p>
<p>In general, “temporary changes anticipated to last less than three months are considered to be information of short duration, which is distributed by notam,” according to the FAA. Notams that cover a change expected to persist for longer than three months may have the language altered to notam when the condition returns to normal. When a notam is originated for a permanent change to published aeronautical information, “PERM” must be inserted in place of a 10-figure date-time group end of validity time.</p>
<p>To submit data for notam creation and distribution, or specifically for obstructions, you can go to the relevant page on FAA.gov. A good place to start—if your side hustle to piloting involves real estate development or tower construction—is the Obstruction Evaluation/Airport Airspace Analysis (OE3A) site, with its helpful introductory video:<a href="https://oeaaa.faa.gov/oeaaa/oe3a/main/#/home"> </a><a href="https://oeaaa.faa.gov/oeaaa/oe3a/main/#/home">https://oeaaa.faa.gov/oeaaa/oe3a/main/#/home</a>.</p>
<p>Plainly put, a developer generally needs to file 45 days before construction if the structure it plans to build is more than 200 feet agl, or penetrates the “trapezoid” of protected area approaching a runway—and it may need to be lit or marked even if not above the 200 feet benchmark, depending on the circumstances. Criteria also exist for lit versus unlit obstructions; those more than 400 feet agl, or those within 6 nm of an airport (or otherwise of safety concern to the airport). And you must be brief: The text of a domestic U.S. notam cannot be longer than 20 lines.</p>
<p>As it turns out, prior notification to the FAA was required for the tower on our road, because it sits inside the airport’s airspace area and sticks up above the tree line, essentially, at all of 157 feet agl.</p>
<p>But it does not present undue hazard, so it was approved within the normal process, which goes like this: The airport receives notification during the planning process, though it does not approve projects, per se. Instead, it may make recommendations to the builder regarding mitigations and/or markings to incorporate into the design to reduce impact to the airport’s approach corridors and instrument procedures. The FAA can disapprove a project, but very rarely does. Instead, it would note any impact to the procedures and use of the full length of the runway—for example, if a developer wanted to build a 50-story hotel just outside the airport property. Any reduction in service puts the airport’s grant assurances in jeopardy and risks fines, normally leading to the changing of said developer’s plan.</p>
<p>The obstruction must complete construction before the notam enters the system and the data goes to the various charting entities, such as Jeppesen, Garmin, and the FAA’s Aeronautical Information Services division.</p>
<p>Which makes sense, if you think about it. If all the projects submitted and under construction were entered into the system before completion, you could hardly see the ground on any given chart—it would resemble a garden of toothpicks carpeting the land. Not to mention the incredible traffic jam of notam text delivered in a preflight briefing. So a delay of a few days between a tower’s apparent completion and the pop-up of the notam advising pilots of it in the system is typical—and considered a reasonable level of safety.</p>
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<h2>There’s an App for That</h2>
<p>Obstructions take time to build—but the dynamic nature of airport runway and taxiway closures drives more immediate concern for pilots and other stakeholders in the system (as the January 2023 outage illuminated dramatically). That’s why having new graphical tools available to flight crews and dispatchers makes a lot of our planning easier. And, this is especially important because while the FAA has improved the infrastructure of the notam system, it’s still up to the disseminators to organize how they are presented.</p>
<p>Garmin’s SmartCharts within the Pilot app has helped pilots put this data into context since mid-2025, with its placement of notams at the top of the airport page, and on the map page in the lower right corner of the plan view. Now, Garmin’s new graphic notams overlay option—launched in November and available with a Premium subscription—makes visualizing the data that much easier. When selected, it depicts active runway, taxiway, and ramp closures, with added FICON (field condition) codes appearing on the runway label. Closed runways and taxiways are color-coded red, while closed runways will show a yellow “X” at each end, just as you’d expect in real life. Conditional closures come in yellow and require the pilot to consult the notam for the details. A clock resident in the runway label will show the time period for any closure, if warranted.</p>
<p>ForeFlight’s graphical notams functionality got a serious expansion in August 2025, when its en-route notam depictions became supported globally. Color-coded based on type, severity, and active times, the notam warnings can also be filtered by type in the map settings. The marriage between Jeppesen and ForeFlight reached a new apex early this fall with the acquisition and melding of the two former Boeing business units into Jeppesen ForeFlight. The relationship has been going on for some time—witness the evolution of Jeppesen’s FlightDeck Pro. Originally, the electronic flight bag (EFB) application targeted for airlines and large flight departments was aimed as a digital chart viewer, but with the Pro X version, it has featured a display-notam tab since 2019, and more recently, a notam overlay option on a selected map—clear collaborations between the Jepp and ForeFlight teams now officially making a go of it together.</p>
<p>With the confluence of extreme volume of data, AI powering a slew of consumer and B2B apps to crunch it, and a more streamlined FAA pipeline to sluice it through, perhaps the days of wading through an ocean of notams—making so much white noise that it’s impossible to pick out the critical signals among them—will soon be as antiquated an operation as straining to listening to a Morse code dot-dash to identify a VOR station.</p>
<h2>Helpful Sites</h2>
<ul>
<li>Primary FAA notam&nbsp;site: <a href="https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/Notams/">https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/Notams/</a></li>
<li>Notam&nbsp;responsibilities guidance: <a href="https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/Notam_html/chap3_section_1.html">https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/Notam_html/chap3_se…</a></li>
<li>Obstruction Evaluation/Airport Airspace Analysis (OE3A):<a href="https://oeaaa.faa.gov/oeaaa/oe3a/main/#/home"> </a><a href="https://oeaaa.faa.gov/oeaaa/oe3a/main/#/home">https://oeaaa.faa.gov/oeaaa/oe3a/main/#/home</a></li>
<li>Notam search: <a href="https://notams.aim.faa.gov/notamSearch/">https://Notams.aim.faa.gov/NotamSearch/</a></li>
<li>Contingency notam site: <a href="http://notambackup.faa.gov">Notambackup.faa.gov</a></li>
</ul>


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