“That’s what NOTAMs are, they’re just a bunch of garbage.” That’s what the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Robert Sumwalt, called the system of notifications which provides pilots with information about their flights.
Sumwalt was speaking after an investigation into how Air Canada flight 759 almost landed on a taxiway full of planes waiting to take off, rather than on a San Francisco runway, on July 7, 2017. The pilots, after a long day of flying and landing at night, lined up for what they thought was runway 28R.
However, the left-hand runway 28L was closed that day, and so the two lit areas that the pilots saw were actually the right-hand runway 28R and a taxiway to the right of the runway. Video camera footage shows the Airbus A320 coming within 14 feet of an aircraft on the taxiway during a go-around manoeuvre.
The investigation [PDF, p63] showed that the runway closure was buried on page 8 of a 27 page flight release package, which also contained route and weather information. The NOTAM indicating the runway 28L closure was on the second page of NOTAM information and only the Captain recalled having seen it.
The UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has responded to the criticism by launching a campaign to cut down on the number of old NOTAMs in the system. It’s a first step in what could be an overhaul of the whole system.
“Every day more or less, you have about 30,000 to 35,000 active NOTAMs. So for a pilot to plan a flight, they sometimes need to go through more than 100 pages of NOTAMs to discover which would affect the flight,” Saulo da Silva, Chief Global Interoperable Systems at ICAO, tells us.
Changes are, fortunately, coming. Da Silva says work is being done on a bigger overhaul of the system, giving it more of a modern digital format, using Internet-based transmission, rather than the current AFTN format. He expects implementation of a new system may be able to start in 2024, though Europe and North America may move faster than other states.
Before the new system arrives, efforts are underway to highlight and reduce the issues. Many NOTAMs are difficult to understand, simply irrelevant, and even potentially hiding more crucial information. One pilot in Germany recently pointed out on Twitter how when planning a local general aviation flight in northern Germany, the closure of Afghanistan airspace popped up in his online briefing.
“It’s too much information for the pilot. Sometimes, you can spend at least 20 minutes trying to understand all the NOTAMs there. It may mean users miss some important information in the middle and some of these may be really important for safety operations,” Da Silva acknowledges.
In another example in February 2019, a Saudi Aramco Boeing 737 was cleared to land on Al Wajh’s runway 15 but instead landed on the parallel taxiway. The taxiway had been used as a temporary runway, but the normal runway had been brought back into service 10 days earlier. The flight crew were again seemingly unaware of the NOTAM saying the main runway was available again.
The Opsgroup, which brings together people from all areas of aviation operations to campaign on airspace safety matters, has long called for improvement to the NOTAM system, setting up a tongue-in-cheek guide to the different kinds of NOTAMs, called A Field Guide to NOTAMs, and running a Worst NOTAM campaign at EBACE.
The jokes are to draw attention to the fact that NOTAMs are a serious safety matter, with Opsgroup saying the shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine could have been avoided had the right information been provided in a better way.
Opsgroup, which has welcomed the ICAO NOTAM campaign, says high on pilots’ wish list is a way to filter and sort NOTAMs, to ensure that big issues like runway or airport closures don’t get buried behind lists of cranes or grass-cutting times. “In other words, show me the critical stuff first, and skip the fluff.”
As its first salvo, ICAO has decided to tackle the old and outdated NOTAMs in the system — those over three months old. If information a NOTAM contains is stable and due to be valid for longer than three months then a country should instead make a change to its Aeronautical Information Publication (AIP), da Silva says.
There are occasions when NOTAMs do need to stay in the system for longer than three months, da Silva acknowledges: if a construction project that affects an airport is unexpectedly delayed, for example. But if, say, a navigation aid is going to be out of action for months, then it is better to make a change to the AIP and corresponding charts — and when it is working, to announce its return via NOTAM and add it back to the AIP, da Silva recommends.
To help out states with the campaign, ICAO developed its own digital tool called the NOTAMeter, which shows the scale of the problem in graphical form. Da Silva says showing the issue this way really helped to bring states on board and convince them that action had to be taken.
The original aim was to cut down the number of NOTAMs by 20-25%, but da Silva said it has managed to go beyond that, by reducing numbers of old NOTAMs by between 30% and 35%.
“We cannot stop, it’s something [where] you have to have constant surveillance on these numbers to guarantee that states don’t forget, and start accumulating NOTAMS again,” he said, saying there will be another push in 2022.
It may have taken 50 years but any efforts to clean up the outdated NOTAM system are to be encouraged. Air Canada 759 is not the only incident where poor NOTAMs played a role, nor will it likely be the last.
Author: Victoria BRYAN
Published: 4th January 2022
Lead Photo by Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa on Unsplash
;
