[augustz]

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.

[powercf]

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.

vs

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.

[DocTomoe]

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...

[michaelt]

  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.

[DocTomoe]

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

[oh_sigh]

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.

[everdev]

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.

[outworlder]

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.

[zackbloom]

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.

[jandrese]

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.