Problems Getting NOTAMS - A Simple GuideGETTING THE NOTAMS
INTRO: A simple person’s guide to mastering the AIS NOTAM website - you know you ought to.
It is my private belief, based not upon any actual statistical research but simply on knowledge of the practices of many flying colleagues, that few private pilots ever bother to get the NOTAMs. Those who fly from clubs or airfields with adequate self briefing facilities may riffle through the NOTAMs covering the entire Flight Information Region stuck up on a notice board but there is so much information presented there, most of it irrelevant to the proposed flight, that many give up around page five and hope for the best as regards the unseen remainder. They should know that the time spent to so little advantage would have been far more profitably employed if they had simply made a free call to 0500 354802. From the pre recorded information on that line they would quickly have learned of any air displays, royal flights or other major hazards taking place on that day.
Further useful information that NOTAMs could have told them about would be less important restricted areas, airfields closed (including perhaps your proposed destination or diversion), navigation beacons and radar services unavailable and a variety of other bits and pieces, any one of which might prove vital to the particular flight in mind.
There is a major problem with the NOTAM system from the private pilot’s point of view, which is that it is presented in a difficult format and usually includes far too much irrelevant information. The system is aimed at the international pilot, who understands ICAO terms and has access to data not readily available to the humble occasional VFR pilot. The Air Information Service (AIS) has made a commendable effort to render its NOTAM website more user friendly to the PPL and it only remains for us to make that extra effort to master the system. There was an excellent detailed description of the operation of this site by Mike Cross in the July 2005 issue of Popular Flying and I am grateful for the way in which that article expanded my own knowledge. This article is pitched at the pilot who has so far enjoyed no useful encounter with the AIS site.
It seems baffling at first but you will soon get the hang of it. This is what you do.
Reserve ten minutes to register and once that has been accomplished and you have received a confirmation e mail back, at least an uninterrupted half hour for the main task. Sit yourself down in front of a PC and have the ICAO airfield locator decode pages of your favourite flight guide open beside you. When reports refer to airfields in code only, you will then be able to identify them. (Yes, I do realise that instructing the AIS computer to add automatically the decode every time is not asking much, but we must be grateful for what we have). You will also need your map with the proposed route marked up. If you are just going for a local flight, the map may be handy anyway.
Get on to the www.ais.org.uk. If you have not registered before, do so now by clicking on How to Subscribe, studying that, paging back and clicking on Subscribe Here. The service is free and Subscribe does not mean that you have to pay. Don’t forget to make a note of your User Name and Password as you will need these every time that you use this site. Select, for the UK and Foreign States service rather than British Isles only even if you never intend leaving our fair shores. Fill in the appropriate boxes and register.
Once registered you will be able to proceed to business by entering your User Name and Password.
Highlight the NOTAM box and start by running down the menu and clicking on VFR FIR Brief EGTT. (Note that EGTT is the England and Wales Flight Information Region, while EGPX is the Scottish – wouldn’t it be helpful if they just said so.)
What you now get is the same as you find posted on the self briefing notice board at a flying club. As usual there’s yards and yards of it and mostly irrelevant. So now we need to avail ourselves of the clever refinement that AIS have added to this resource.
Go back to the NOTAM menu but this time click on ‘Narrow Route Brief (FPL Route)’. This is what you need to reduce the mass of NOTAM information to what is relevant to your flight only.
Now you have to fill in a lot of boxes, starting with the Briefing ID: entering your destination here will probably prove most useful. There are only three other boxes that you absolutely must fill in – the departure and destination airfields and the flight level. You will need the ICAO codes for the airfields (or you can press the arrow alongside the box to find the code). For the flight level, unless you are proposing to fly above FL 080, I recommend entering FL 040. This will cover you for up to 4,000 ft at departure and destination and from the ground up to FL080 en route. Let’s assume a flight from Compton Abbas (EGHA) to Cambridge (EGSC).
Now this particular flight presents some practical problems for the VFR pilot as you must either route north about the London TMA and the Luton CTA or south about the London TMA and the Stansted CTA. Either will give you a rather curved route and as we have the route set up for this NOTAM search so far, we are showing a direct flight between the two (that’s what ‘DCT’ in the ROUTE box means) and a Narrow Route Width for our enquiry of only 10 nm. The simplest way to cope with our curved route will be to expand the route width and 40 nm will cover our digression in this case.
If we choose not to enter any date and time for our flight and any validity period, then the enquiry will default to the next 48 hours and this will be good enough for many cases.
So let’s submit the enquiry as now shown, with a direct flight from EGHA to EGSC at FL040 and a 40 mile route width. The result when I tried this on 25 October 2005 was some airfield information for Cambridge and about 45 items of en route information. This is a great deal less than the information for the entire EGTT FIR but possibly it still contains too many irrelevancies.
If you want to narrow it down some more, you easily can. To start with, under TRAFFIC you can opt for VFR instead of VFR/IFR.
And then you can set out something close to your actual proposed route and narrow the route width to 10 nm again. In my example, I have opted for the southern route and my waypoints will be: Alderbury – Chilbolton – Alton – Gravesend – Chelmsford – Rivenhall – Sible Hedingham – Haverhill. It seems complicated because I am choosing easily recognised waypoints and line features as these are more valuable to the VFR pilot than any amount of carefully calculated co-ordinates. For the purposes of the NOTAM search, however, we can simplify the route as even a 10 nm route width gives us some scope to play with.
This NOTAM facility, as I explained before, works only in ICAO terms. We are going to have to insert some waypoints in the Route box but the software will not recognise Visual Reporting Points (VRPs) and other features found on your visual map. So we have to duck and dive a bit here. The software does not even recognise ICAO airfield codes as waypoints – only as departure and destination points. However, it does recognise radio beacons, be they VORs or NDBs. Furthermore, it recognises positions in relation to beacons. Thus Gravesend, our major turning point, can be described for the purposes of the search as being on the 060 deg radial from Biggin Hill VOR at a distance of 13 nm. (Thanks to those compass roses planted on your map over each VOR, you can just estimate the radial on the rose to the nearest five degrees and measure off the distance.) In ICAO speak, Gravesend is expressed as BIG060013. Note that the distance as well as the bearing is shown as three figures, 13 nm coming out as 013.
Although there are slight kinks in our proposed route from Compton Abbas to Gravesend they will not take us out of our 10 nm route width, so we can enter in the ROUTE box - after DCT - BIG060013.
The route onwards from Gravesend to Cambridge diverts too far to the East around Stansted for a ‘Direct’ to be adequate for our purposes, so we need to put in another waypoint at, say, Rivenhall. A quick flash of the scale rule shows that this can be shown as LAM055022.
The software requires a ‘DCT’ at the beginning, the end and in between each waypoint, so our Route box entry ends up as ‘DCT BIG060013 DCT LAM055022 DCT’ Now change the route width to 10 nm and press Submit again.
When I tried it, these refinements reduced the en route reports to a manageable 18. Of these, those that seemed to me of most importance to the proposed flight were:
GWC VOR/DME out of service between 10.00 and 15.00, so it would be no good looking for any navigational assistance from that quarter during those times.
A captive balloon up to 550 ft AGL above Chobham, Surrey.
32 fast jets in high energy manoeuvres between 500ft and FL 240 between 10.30 and 13.30. That sounded like something to keep well clear of, but just where it would take place was deeply concealed in an endless series of lat/long co-ordinates. Inspection of these eventually revealed that the whole business was going on over the North Sea, and this left me wondering why the military genius who reported all these co-ordinates could not be bothered to tell us this small but vital fact. Their colleague, who reported another similar exercise on the same day helpfully added to the list of co-ordinates: OVERLAND SOUTHWEST ENGLAND, WALES, LAKE DISTRICT AND SPADEADAM RANGE. If one can do this, why cannot the other?
The upper limit of Danger Area D146 would be lowered to 2,000 ft. This could be useful information if only I knew where on earth D146 was to be found. To make this piece of information practically useful to the itinerant pilot the reporter only had to add after ‘D146’, ‘(3nm NW of Sheerness)’.
Military exercises involving close air support, fast jets, helicopters and Nimrod aircraft and more of those high energy manoeuvres that are best steered clear of. This time the reporter placed the exercises, OVERLAND SOUTHERN ENGLAND, CENTRED ON SALISBURY PLAIN TRAINING AREA. Give that military reporter a Commendation for usefulness and remember to watch out near Salisbury Plain.
Between 08.00 and 18.00 the area within 2 nm radius of Hampton Court would be restricted.
Danger Area D139’s upper limit to be reduced to 1,500 ft. Would it have added all that much to the national debt for Jobsworth to have added the vital information, ‘(3 nm SSE of Colchester)’? Is this all just an exercise in covering the military backside or is it a serious attempt to communicate useful information?
For further research purposes I made a free call to the pre recorded information on 0500 354802 (the final fall back for those unable to brief themselves more professionally). The only report was of the North Sea exercise, whose location is described as, “over the Southern North Sea”. So they can say it if they want to.
Having done our homework, we can now, if so inclined, mark up our map with a red cross through GWC VOR/DME, a red circle around Chobham and Hampton Court and big red exclamation mark over Salisbury Plain near our track. We might also show the temporary lower upper limits for the two danger areas.
The Salisbury Plain exercise report enhanced the value of keeping touch with Boscombe Down radar when in that vicinity. Beyond that there was nothing of major importance amongst this particular trawl, unless you were going to use GWC as a navigational aid, but negative information is always useful too. The point is that unless you actually check your NOTAMs you will not know about a whole variety of hazards, some as serious as an air display or a temporary restricted area, until you find yourself in the middle of it. Reflect for a moment on the possible consequences of that, not only for your foolish self, but for the whole world of private flying.
Checking the NOTAMs for a local flight is very simple, once you have set up the system: you simply search for a short narrow route that includes the local area. So, if Compton Abbas is your base, you could search for a flight from, say, Yeovilton (EGDY) to Southampton (EGHI).
Use a quiet half hour to familiarise yourself with the NOTAM facility on the AIS website so that when you want to use it for real on your next flight it will not seem so difficult to cope with.
And never, ever, ever, take to the air, even for just a little trip around the local area, without at least a quick free call to 0500 354802 so as to avoid that really awful incident. There can be no adequate excuse for not taking at least this minimum precaution. Have you written that number down somewhere?
Nigel Everett
Editor, FS
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