On Questioning The Need To Snow
In an era where airlines are treating pilots’ flight time limits (FTL) as targets, the time available for an operation’s dispatch outbrief is limited. Pilots cannot afford to turn up early and spend an extra 20 minutes reading through copious paperwork preflight or they would be making inroads into their permissible duty time. Yet pilots globally are complaining that they are being snowed under by the flood of NOTAMS that are being pressed upon them – and with which they have a legal obligation to read and familiarize themselves. But firstly, what is a NOTAM? It’s a “notice to airmen” containing info concerning the establishment, condition or change in any aeronautical facility, service, procedure or hazard, the timely knowledge of which is essential to personnel concerned with flight safety operations. Don’t confuse this with the snowtam. A SNOWTAM is a message describing the surface conditions of the runways, taxiways and apron at an aerodrome. So it’s essential – there certainly is a “need to know”; but is there a need to “snow” them upon crews? Who compiles them and who (if anybody) winnows the applicability and time effectivity wheat from the chaff?
NOTAMs are created and transmitted by government agencies under guidelines specified by ICAO Annex 15: Aeronautical Information Services of the International Convention on Civil Aviation. They are normally in English and that in itself creates some comprehension problems for international flight crews. Similar to meteorological reports, they are also wholly in an encoded shorthand. That’s a hangover from the era when such messages were abbreviated to be sent via telex/teleprinter. Because the FAA format varies from the ICAO format, it’s easy to misinterpret them and their effectivity periods. It’s also too easy to quickly skim and dismiss items as irrelevant, although the vast majority will be. The amount of data couched in NOTAM format is beyond copious, it’s totally cumbersome. The current issue of US Notams alone is 487 pages long. A long-haul crew would typically be handed a dossier of 18 pages of notams vaguely pertinent to their route and alternates. There is no easy way to reformat notams, so the best a crew could expect is that a company dispatcher might highlight the important items with a yellow marker. It’s not a format that lends itself to speed-reading, but not having them, glossing over them or treating them dismissively can put one into a world of hurt.
Recall the photo of the C130 that traversed a large ditch dug across a runway in Iraq (images at tinyurl.com/38ar3n). The military failed to notam that one, so the crew got a rude night-landing shock. But even when there is a notam raised, a pilot can fail to discriminate it as pertinent to his operation as it sits amongst its brethren in a large sheaf of papers that he’s handed – perhaps because he’s in a hurry and plans to read it after takeoff. Best of intentions of that variety don’t always transpire. Local notams are sometimes highlighted in the ATIS (Airfield Terminal Information Service broadcast) that the crew would listen to before start-up – but not always. Such was the case on July 16, 2006 at Manchester, UK.
The F/O crewing Excel Flt 2146 arrived at operations early and began the review of flight-planning data. While he was thus engaged, the captain rang and advised that he was stuck in traffic. The F/O assumed the captain’s task and diverted his attention to addressing the weather and calculating an appropriate fuel load. His routine was disrupted.
Although as part of that fuel determination process he had to check the NOTAMS for destination and enroute alternates, the copilot missed his review of Manchester NOTAMS. These would have told him that the Takeoff Run Available (TORA) for runway 06L had been reduced by “works in progress”. Manchester was de-rubberizing the touchdown zone for the reciprocal of the runway in use. The TORA for 06L was reduced to 1,926m from its full length of 3,048m.
The captain met the F/O as he was leaving Ops and cross-checked the fuel load but decided to scan the NOTAMS at the aircraft. At the aircraft, the commander was distracted by a need to reprogram the FMS and, although the copilot listened to the ATIS, he skipped the addenda at the end, after the warning of bird activity, with which he was familiar. The addenda reminded pilots about the reduced TORA on 06L. Reduced take-off thrust was set on the assumption that the full length ahead was available. The runway had a hump in the middle. When they cleared the crest of the rise and espied the seven vehicles not far ahead on the runway, it was obvious that they wouldn’t be able to stop in time, prompting the pilot to rotate at the computed Vr. Because the 737-800 crew simultaneously firewalled the throttles, they cleared the (nearest) 17-foot-tall vehicle by 17m. The subsequent investigation found that on the night before the Excel incident, ATC had instructed three passenger aircraft to go-around after they had knowingly positioned them to land on the reduced length runway. The crews of all three aircraft were quite unaware of the reduced length available and, when informed, stated that it was insufficient for them to be able to land. The closest aircraft, a Tristar, was at a range of 2.5 nm when instructed to go-around. External distribution of the Manchester NOTAM had been flawed. As an aside, the contractors were pretty trusting in calculated accelerate/stop distances to be working in their favor on the end of a live runway… with no stopway and no RESA (runway end safety area) factored in. One day there will be a reject takeoff in such circumstances and the graphs will be put to the test…
This parlous saga was repeated at Auckland, NZ on 22 March, 2007 when an Emirates 777-300 had to go to max power to clear construction equipment seen ahead during mid-takeoff on runway 05R. The effective length had been reduced from 11,200ft to 7,120ft (i.e. by more than one third its length), but they’d missed that NOTAM. Their mindset was that the full runway had been in use for their arrival two hours before. If the crew had been operating a longer sector than just to Brisbane, or been tankering fuel, they’d not have been able to resolve the situation with a mere last second application of maximum power (per the MK airlines 747 freighter crash at Halifax, Nova Scotia). If it had been night-time, they’d probably not have seen the obstructions in time to react at all. The ghastly outcome would have been little different to that of the Singapore Airlines Flight SQ006 747 at Taipei. SQ006 attempted its takeoff from a notam’d closed runway. The Emirates EK419 crew had calculated their takeoff performance and reduced thrust on the flight-deck using their class 1 Electronic Flightbags and the full runway length. No takeoff performance numbers were sent to them via ACARS (as happens with some airline dispatch arrangements). If they had been, it might have been a wake-up call. But it’s not only departing aircraft that strike notam trouble.
On 16 November, 2004 Asiana Flight 607, a 777-200, landed short of runway 23L’s 4080ft displaced threshold at Auckland (NZAA), amidst works in progress. Luckily the workers were kept clear by their canny supervisor and the bitumen was still intact. Despite the ATIS carrying the broadcast information about the displaced threshold, and being reminded of it by ATC on seven separate occasions, the Korean crew’s English was so poor that they failed to elicit its significance. A very explicit Notam, AIP supplement and special issue color-coded AIP approach plate were in effect but the Asiana crew of A6-EBC hadn’t received the first two items. That ball had been fumbled by their dispatcher at Inchon, and the pilots were carrying Jeppesen instrument approach plates. However to be fair for those not familiar with it, NZAA has three sets of Jepp charts – white, green and yellow, depending on whether you’ve got normal ops (full length on 05R/23L), alternate runway ops (05L/23R), or reduced length on 05R/23L. The ATIS will invariably state which set of charts to use, even when it’s just a case of ‘Normal operations, use Jeppesen white pages’. So if that’s what the ATIS said, then it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the Emirates or Asiana crew to expect full length regardless of what the NOTAMs said (after all, it’s not uncommon to see an ILS notam’d as being out-of-service somewhere – only to arrive there and find it’s working normally). In addition, the NZAA notams state that activation of the applicable notam and its runway works is periodic and notified via ATIS. If you listen to the ATIS 15 mins before start and don’t later update yourself, then there’s the nasty trap.
But as one fed up aviator said: “How come it’s 2007 and we’re still using a Notam system designed in the 1950s to minimize character transmissions? Where are the filters for all the gunk that’s already been published in the Jeppesens many months ago? Where are the graphics? Surely not too hard in our digital world? Why can’t the airport operators figure out that it’s unsafe and inappropriate to shove tons of unnecessary chicken cack down the throats of throttle pushers?” Another ventured: “What sometimes gets my goat is when they don’t clean out notams… some airports keep notams forever. Example:
30 SEP 2005 16:11 UNTIL PERM INTERMEDIATE HOLDING POSITION T (TANGO) WITHDRAWN LOWW – mark well, this notam is from 2005!
You’ll find many like this at some airports – which sometimes makes it hard to spot the important ones.” Yet another said cynically: “The NOTAM system is perfect in all respects. That is, it’s perfect to protect the backsides of everyone except the pilots. “Captain, why didn’t you read the NOTAM related to xyz on page 13, the forty fifth line down? It was right there in front of you.” So the airport is covered, the dispatchers are covered, management is covered, ATC is covered. And of course you are covered if you can comprehend endless gibberish at 3am in the morning and remember everything seven hours later. So why would anyone ever want to change it? It hangs the pilots out to dry, but everyone else is covered.”
From the professional dispatcher’s viewpoint: “I can’t imagine what NOTAMs would be like ‘unfiltered’; must be hell! Every day I remove all the ‘HN’ (hours of night) NOTAMs and stuff that’s not in our time window – and leave what is necessary. Priority ONE all the big stuff (RWY closures, major TWY closures, ILS out etc.), priority two the other things (TWYs closed but not on our taxi route etc.). We also have a nice feature in our NOTAM software system. It looks at the ETD & ETA and if a NOTAM falls into these times, the crew gets it. If it falls outside, then it’s filtered out.” But apparently Emirates doesn’t run a dispatch system. It’s a pilot-help-yourself system… as are many other operations, large and small.
The unsatisfactory Notam format and dissemination was first addressed officially in two seminal documents over a decade ago. The FAA’s Human Factors Team Report on: The Interfaces Between Flight Crews and Modern Flight Deck Systems of June 18, 1996 and the Flight Safety Foundation’s Nov 98 Task Force on Approach & Landing & CFIT Accidents each said that an improved worldwide notam dissemination process needed to be established with uniform standards for format, distribution and timeliness. The FAA Team (Comm/Coord- 5) said verbatim that, “via an internationally harmonized solution, the information should be prioritized and highlighted in terms of urgency and importance, and presented in a clear, well-organized, easy-to-understand format suitable for use with current and future airplanes.” But, is there anything happening now?
Lufthansa Systems offer LIDO Flight Planning Services (tinyurl.com/2r24zl): “provide us with the schedule, payload and operational conditions of your flights, and we will supply all relevant briefing information (including weather).” LIDO even handles ETOPS flights and coordinates everything with your company’s own OPS CTR. With their renowned Teutonic thoroughness, the all-encompassing briefing and flight-planning package will, at a price, keep crews from the error-prone fumblings and bumblings that are the typical traits of those trying to cope within the current mal-administered system.
Supposedly the FAA is very much aware of the pent-up frustration that’s out there. The FAA held a “NOTAM Industry Day” on 21 May for comments and suggestions on improving the FAA NOTAM system. A Powerpoint overview of this project can be found at tinyurl.com/397nwx
Perhaps ultimately, courtesy of computerization and EFB’s, pilots may be able to soon throw those sheafs of sheets “to the wind”.
NOTAMs are issued for a multitude of reasons:
-
hazards such as air-shows and parachute jumps
-
flights by important people such as heads of state
-
closed runways, compromised runway & appch lighting
-
inoperable radio navigational aids
-
military exercises with resulting airspace restrictions
-
inoperative lights on tall obstructions
-
temporary erection of obstacles near airfields (e.g. cranes)
-
passage of flocks of birds through airspace (a NOTAM in this category is known as a BIRDTAM)