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Comment by augustz | Hacker News Reader

Just for SFO you have 84 NOTAMs.

!SFO 06/079 SFO OBST RIG (ASN 2017-AWP-3368-NRA) 373740N1222224W (0.5NM NE SFO) 41FT (34FT AGL) FLAGGED AND LGTD 1806201400-1811010100

This is a flagged and lighted obstruction half a mile way that is 34 feet above ground level.

Now put in a full route and takeoff airport and maybe if you have had some stops during the day. The NOTAM seems a bit long. Then if are overseas and have to deal with the BS political notams. Check out greece and turkey notams.

...THE REF (B) TURKISH NOTAM A3009/16 LTAAYNYX (111139 EUECYIYN JUL 2016) HAS NO GROUND, CANNOT PRODUCE ANY INTERNATIONALLY LEGAL EFFECT WITHIN ATHINAI FIR/ HELLAS UIR AND IS CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID.

I'm curious how many pilots fully read all NOTAMs, locate them geographically to understand where they are etc etc on every flight.

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Outputting that in lower case could be a small step to making them easier to parse, and therefore more likely to be read. I find the text you posted tiring even to look at.

THE REF (B) TURKISH NOTAM A3009/16 LTAAYNYX (111139 EUECYIYN JUL 2016) HAS NO GROUND, CANNOT PRODUCE ANY INTERNATIONALLY LEGAL EFFECT WITHIN ATHINAI FIR/ HELLAS UIR AND IS CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID.

The ref (B) Turkish NOTAM A3009/16 LTAAYNYX (111139 Euecyiyn Jul 2016) has no ground, cannot produce any internationally legal effect within Athinai FIR/Hellas UIR and is considered null and void.

How much experience do you have reading all-caps text? It isn't necessarily a burden to people who are used to it, which all airline pilots are.

I'm sure prior experience is a big factor, but I could see how the greater height variances in lower case text can make it easier to read.

Yeah, good luck with changing hundreds of established, life-or-death-systems, most of them actually embedded in planes in the airline industry worldwide, at the same cutover date, to suddenly support mixed-case script.

Have a one-hour watch to understand what kind of beast you are wrestling here: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6308_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281...

  good luck with changing hundreds of established, 
  life-or-death-systems, most of them actually
  embedded in planes

Seems to me that's precisely the sort of thing the NTSB _is_ supposed to be able to do?

Of course IMHO a mere change of case doesn't go far enough.

You do realize that US planes still have to be able to fly to countries other than the US, and vice versa, right?

Indeed. 'Notices' can be almost anything.

I was doing simulated flights over the continental US recently. Even small airports may have a lot of NOTAMs. Some are important (for instance, warning about objects close to some parts of the runway, or issues with a runway, or even animals or birds), but many others are completely useless.

Noise abatement restrictions ironically add a lot of NOTAM 'noise'. There should be a separate category for these, as these are not safety related.

This was 100% my read as well. NOTAMs are terribly formatted and have no priority distinction between ones which are essentially useless, and ones with meaningful consequences.

Had a project once where we were trying to parse NOTAMs so we could program a GPS with a warning indicator if you were about to fly into a restricted airspace.

Turns out that people type what they want and the parser ended up needing to be almost a full AI. The exclusion zone around DC is a nightmare to parse for example.

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