[repiret]

To add some nuance to what other commenters have said, 95%+ of all NOTAMs are useless, telling you about grass that might be mowed, animals that might be present, temporary "obstacles" that you could only hit if you were flying both dangerously and illegally, correcting immaterial typos in the charts, or updates to dubiously helpful information published in the charts (number of hotels in the surrounding area).

Others are potentially useful, but not essential for safe flight. Things like closed taxiways, nonavailability of services at an airport, etc.

And a very few are really critically important. Runway closures, correction to vital chart information, airspace changes, malfunctioning navigation aids.

The FAA's reaction to the NOTAM outage was probably the correct course of action. But make no mistake, the volume of spam NOTAMs combined with the lack of an easy way for a pilot to quickly sort for important NOTAMs makes us all less safe.

[snuxoll]

> But make no mistake, the volume of spam NOTAMs combined with the lack of an easy way for a pilot to quickly sort for important NOTAMs makes us all less safe.

The system is in desperate need of some modernization, no argument there. The fact that there isn't a simple criticality filed with them that makes it easy to see what will actually impact flight planning (airspace closure / runway closure vs stupid chart updates) is insane.

[tjohns]

The problem is that "criticality" is too binary. A tower light NOTAM might be low-criticality for a fixed-wing airplane pilot flying day VFR, but high-criticality for a helicopter pilot flying at night in IMC.

Similarly, chart updates are very important if you're flying IFR. Going below minimums while in the soup ends... very badly. If somebody's changed the MEA/DA/MDA, you can bet I want to know.

NOTAMs do have keywords to tell you the subject (i.e. airport closure vs tower light), and most briefings will highlight the ones likely to be urgent.

(That said, I'd argue printing out all the tower notams in textual format is somewhat useless. The NEXTGEN FSS briefings are plotting them graphically now, which is an improvement.)

[mbreese]

The idea is probably that is you included a criticality flag, pilots would ignore low priority notices and potentially miss something (like grass being mowed at the time they plan on landing) that could affect them, but is otherwise immaterial for most others.

I can’t say one way or the other, as I’m not a pilot, but that’s the argument I’d make to keep the system w/o priority levels.

[repiret]

As a pilot of single-engine airplanes, I disagree that mowing is useful. I need to look at the runway I'm landing on for obstructions no matter what. The time of year when mowing might occur, I might also have to contend with deer, who are just as hazardous and don't file NOTAMs before grazing near the runway.