[tjohns]

The official weather notifications (METARs/TAFs) can be displayed in more modern ways, but many pilots like the brief coded weather messages because they can be easily skimmed for an entire route of flight.

In my mind, AIRMETs were a bigger problem - they had limitations in terms of how they were geographically defined, time range, and lack of flexibility (e.g. differentiating turbulence vs LLWS vs strong surface winds for AIRMET Tango) - but that's been fixed with the newer G-AIRMET feed[1], which is based around BUFR[2] instead of plain text.

The catch being you can't easily convey G-AIRMETs via voice or in an non-interactive environment, so we still keep the legacy text-based AIRMET feed around in parallel.

[1]: https://www.aviationweather.gov/gairmet/help

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUFR