It's the system that's broken if such a simple mistake brings down the entire system

@@anonymousarmadillo6589 I know, and I can assure you it's not the only system like that. We host a different software for ~30 customers and I regularly have to restart one of these instances because the software just randomly died. It still feels terrible to be the IT guy in charge of a system that so many people defend on, regardless of how shitty it is.

when the new hire tip toes around the corner and whispers "Do we have a quick way to restore the production database?"

@@MyrKnof ... while you are trying to find out why the backup system is broken.

IT admin here as well. Good god same. We're a small hosting business that once got hit with ransomware. That day SUCKED. I can only imagine the horror of the dude updating the NOTAM system that morning. Pure and complete, blood draining horror.

🧀🧀🧀

Outrageous! Why did the aviation industry implement the "Emmental model" when there apparently are much safer cheeses available?

Apparently, they went to the aviation cheese shop, and they were all out of cheese. Except a tiny bit of Brie, and it's quite watery.

@@johnclement5903 😅

And that is a classic example of the model working - you have highlighted an issue, thank you, and stopped it causing a problem later on! 🧀😉

Kind of.. yeah

well, in the end pilots are managers. They carry the responsibility for their aircraft and the whole flight and are to make the final decisions. How do you design a system, where someone else takes the responsibility to decide, which information is presented (prioritized) to the pilots and which information isn't? I don't say it is impossible, but that it has an impact on responsibilities, training and culture. I think that needs long and intensive debates.

@@patrickhanft The air transport industry already does exactly this. For example, Airbus and Boeing engineers decide, when multiple warnings would be emitted, which ones take priority, suppressing some so that others are more clear. But in the case of NOTAMs, it would make more sense to share the responsibility by making them more of a database that you could query, so that you can ask to see, e.g., all the NOTAMs associated with a particular airport (which would include ones relevant to your approach path), and study just those before moving on to the next group.

@@MentourNow That is weirdly chilling answer from your honesty

@@Curt_Sampson and @Patrick Hanft, precisely on-topic! The answer is to avoid “push data” when possible. Push data is likely to be an interruption of the aviator’s attention, and always has that drawback. A stick shaker is one of the minority of inputs which merits the interruption of the aviator-it’s critically important information. The artificial horizon is “pull data” - it’s right in front and available. “Push data” is by nature unintegrated, intrusive and distracting. It can fragment situational awareness. “Push data” is lifesaving sometimes; but it must follow “aviator’s etiquette” and follow some “AI robot’s’ rules” for appropriate CRM.

Honestly, I think legalese should be audited for this reason. Perhaps only in the case of lawsuit. For example, lets say an EULA or some other type of contract holds one party accountable, but that party countersues with the assertion that the contract itself obfuscates that accountability. Something that could be admissible into evidence is something like a randomized focus group that shows your average citizen either wont read the contract, or even CANT read the contract because of the legalese it's written in, or just demonstrate the willingness of your average person to blindly agree to terms due to how many services in day to day life shove terms down your throat if you want to get literally anything done. Im sure apple has a term in its EULA for itunes that demands your first born be handed over to the company, and Im sure 99.999% of end users click agree without reading it, because the idea of being asked to sit down and read a 200 page legal document just to listen to some music is completely ridiculous. Im pretty sure some contracts and EULAs already are considered "invalid" in court for these sorts of reasons, if one party can prove the EULA or contract is utterly ridiculous. Unfortunately, the problem with NOTAMs is that they are published by government agencies... And the government reserves the right to pick and choose which cases against it, that it is willing to hear... Which means most court cases brought against the US government are dead on arrival, because they have zero incentive in being put in a position where they might actually have to admit fault... So NOTAMs can hold civilian US pilots accountable, but those same pilots cant hold the US government accountable for making NOTAMs completely unreadable.

Read the specifications for a public works construction project.

​@hatman4818 okay, I've never thought of this before now, but WHY hasn't this happened already? Now it seems so obvious b

RandomUser... that happens a lot. Usually with long replies, posts with external links and even when the system decides (on its own) that certain words might be targeting someone or are cuss words/ harsh words. . There were times.. when I used the word "m0₹0nic"... and it was contextual. But the system never made it live to others.

@@sailaab yeah it was a long reply, great job Google, really. This is so annoying, you invest time into a well tought out comment and it shadow bans it. Like if there's a problem, fine, tell me. But I have to open my own comment in a private tab to see if it shows up to others, this is so ridiculous! Edit: Splitting the exact same text up into two comments makes them show up, oh come on!

I'm glad initiatives like these are finally happening. There are so many historical things in avation that grind my gears as to why they are still being used, given that there are so many better modern alternatives and the security implications. Just a few examples - NOTAMs and other horrible-to-read bcs unnecessarily coded messaging systems - The whole radio system. Why is aviation still relying on horribly hard to understand, broken and ambiguous voice messages for crucial and security related communication? Just a quick reminder that this system caused the worst disaster in aviation so far in Teneriffe, among many others.

- Constant GPS-based location monitoring of planes that cannot be turned off unless all power is lost. I still cannot wrap my head around the whole MH370 disaster. Sending a GPS ping every minute or so to a satellite does not cost that much compared to overall cost of aviation and clearly engine manufacturers manage to use this system. - Nonsensical units like nautical miles, knots and so on as borrowed from marine. It's not only the imperial system, it's even worse.

@@RandomUser2401 I have had the same issue. I now write longer comments in Word before copying into YT. Then I have a record of it. Yes, it's a shame they won't tell you what the problem is.

but that wasn't because the lights were out, or that it wasn't published, or if it was published it wasn't read by the pilot.

Those are the kind of garbage NOTAMs that have ruined the system. I know you did what you were supposed to but pages and pages of NOTAMs about cell towers with light out makes absolutely zero difference in real safety except to drown out important NOTAMs like runway closures that do matter.

​@@kimchristensen3727 If it is just one or two towers where the lights have broken and won't be fixed until tomorrow, I think that's a good use of a NOTAM. It is the NOTAMs for every single crane, even though they have a working light at the top, that are a problem.

That stuff needs to be relagated to an app for GA pilots, cause Airline pilots flying at 30000ft and following Standard Instrument Departures and Arrivals have very little use for that information. It drowns out the important information like a crossing restriction change.

@@TrainerAQ NOTAMs are supposed to specify the altitudes they are relevant to. If they have been filed correctly, you won't get told about cell towers you are going to be flying over at 30,000 feet. You'll only get the ones close to the airports you are using.

Not a pilot but I imagine having them in a format which can be parsed by a computer and displayed on a map would already help a lot. Having categories (e.g. obstacles, navigation aids, runways …) would help too. Having other information sources like approach charts updated in real time and the data included there would also help (maybe with highlighted differences to the previous version).

@@Mike-oz4cv Some good points. The AIRAC system is very much outdated in the era of Foreflight, etc. For example, so many STARs and SIDs are different on the NOTAMs than on the charts. It made sense in the days before EFBs to make sure all IFR pilots and controllers were on the same AIRAC cycle. These days a date would be sufficient as any IFR pilot has some sort of subscription service. Even a small red bar on the charts/plates that say something to the effect of [MINIMUMS MODIFIED AS OF ] so pilots can see at a glance that an approach they've done 500 times had a recent modification.

@@Mike-oz4cv As a person who has been editing Wikipedia and other wikis over 20 years. I think a wiki format would help a lot. That way you can just EDIT the NOTAM to update it instead of publishing a completely different document with just the change info.

​@@marhawkman303 WIKI-text is nice and all, but for those who don't work with it frequently it is just text with embedded formatting garbage. For most large software documentation tasks we don't use it, nor do we attempt to coordinate edits to text located in a shared database. The chance of a collision leading to unintended results that can cause dangerous errors is just too high. That said, I'm not going to ask pilots to attempt to assemble "unified diffs" (literally a document made up almost entirely of changes) to figure out what they need to know. A shared git repository with a small flock of area managers to do quality control and change management would be great, but it doesn't solve the presentation problem either. Pilots are going to need a solution designed by engaging working pilots and engineers collaboratively-not something nominated by somebody else.

@@DrewNorthup you as a pilot wouldn't be editig the text though, you'd just read it.

IKR?? 😵‍💫 All the standard risk assessment systems I'm aware of use at least one ranking system (sometimes even 2 compounding ones, such as likely frequency x likely severity). As far as I can tell, NOTAMs don't even seem to be broken down by low/med/high priority, let alone timeframe...? Given how short turnaround times on flights seem to be becoming, I can't even imagine how pilots could read all of that, let alone correctly filter it for what's safety-essential for their flight & what's not. When a system reaches that level of info overload, definitely feels like it starts being a hazard in its own right, rather than a risk mitigation strategy!

You flattered yourself too much there. probably wasn’t because of you 😂

@@tubby921 Why not? had to be someone and I was the only one complaining so I'll take the credit. People were right when they said to me 'You'd be surprised who listens when you speak up. But you have to speak up.' If the change indeed didn't happen by my comments, it's no loss to me but people like to have their efforts noticed. I did. Did you?

Have you ever been checked for narcissism? Or delusions of grandeur? You think your single complaints would change something that everybody else is enjoying or not bothered by?

The lamp change was soo good I had to do a double check to even notice that there was a plant!

that reminds me of how videogame save files work..... it's a giant pile of codes that mean nothing to a casual observer since the codes are stuff like "item 4" except it's the number 4 in binary, and the game only knows it's an item because of location in the save file.

And YOU are the reason the video gets made. Thanks!

But hes is wrong in this video. Hes blaming FAA for software and TRAINING Airline pilots should already have. If the NOTAM was in Greek and the pilot wasn't trained to read and understand it would they even be a pilot?? NOTAM is like HTML. The Airlines need to provide a browser. Also, he just ragged on the format with ZERO input on what it should be like.

@@uarenothelping3128 First if all, I’m not blaming the FAA. I’m blaming the global NOTAM format for being outdated. Of course we can read the NOTAMS, but the shear volume and difference in quality of the information makes it impossible to handle in the 45min we have to prepare the flight. When it comes to interpreting the coordinates of a danger area for example, we would need a chart and a plotter to visualize if it affects our route, something the system doesn’t provide. With the modern technologies we have, a graphical representation would not be hard to make. I’m pointing out the problems that the whole airline business have with this system but fixing it is up to the involved authorities.

@@uarenothelping3128 ​ he’s not wrong in this video. Or, if he is wrong, so is everybody else in the industry. Your comment about training, reading, and understanding leads me to believe you don’t understand the issue, and probably weren’t even paying attention to the video.

@@valerierodger He is wrong. The NOTAM is readable. Instead of changing NOTAM 'code' learn to read it. Airlines should provide piliots with tools to read them. HE doesn't understand. HE didn't provide any solutions. Just NOTAMS bad . Really the whole world uses NOTAMs. He even mentioned software that reads/decoads NOTAMs. Yet he is still banging away at a non issue. The 'industry' doesn't think NOTAMS are bad this is just his and your opinion. This isn't a NOTAM issue is a Aline and training issue.

The worse! Or say the airport gets turned around to a different runway/approach now you have to dig through the NOTAMs to make sure there are’nt any adjustments that need to be made to the minimums. This seems to always happen while you’re approaching the last fix on the arrival. Now you have to get the latest ATIS, get new performance numbers, reprogram the fms, rebug and reset up all your frequencies, re-brief the arrival/ approach all while below 10,000 Feet.

@@AirmanBrown honestly, at this point they should convert to a wiki-style format. Teh sheer volume of updates is impractical to try to parse as a series of telegraph messages.

Or when they change say a missed approach procedure so instead of NOTAMing it until the next plate comes out then changing the plate. They just NOTAM it forever.

@@Bluerazor52 this is the most annoying one I think. The plates get updated regularly, no need to keep the amendment there in the notam forever just cluttering everything up.

@@Bluerazor52 😂 makes no sense

The database backend system that broke wasn't the antiquated part it is a modern system. The old text format is actually quite robust when used properly.

I know what TELEX is (hell, when I started to learn programming, we had punched cards; at least we've moved on from that), but what does CW mean here? I am sure I'm gonna kick myself when you tell me, but I'm ready. Thanks.

@@bikeny CW is Morse transmission over radio signals in radio operators language

@@LuigiRosa CW standing for continuous wave but as you indicate, often used to mean morse code.

Yes, I heard this, too.

If only aviation used the CLEAR model.....oh wait.

Interesting to see your perspective. In the 90's USAF weather services were blocked from dumping our teletype systems because of NOTAMS since we served as the reception point for the data.

In the 70’s and early 80’s the NWS and FAA used electro writers to pass weather. It was an overhead projector with a motorized roll of acetate and an “electric pen” that would write on the acetate and project onto the wall as the operator at the other end used the pen to write. It worked over an open phone line and the operator at either end could send messages. It had an ink well we had to fill every couple of days and we would replace and then wash and re-roll the acetate. Worked great until the ink would leak and the ink blob would menacingly spread across the whole thing darling the radar room with a menacing black blob on the wall. That was followed by a groan of agony from the junior controller that knew he would have to clean it all up. In the tower a motorized roll of paper was used instead of the projector. Fun times.

I sometimes read the "Area Forecast Discussion" from the NWS for Los Angeles, CA. After reading your comment, I thought, "No, it's still ALL CAPS, isn't it?" but just checked and it's not. It's more normal language now. They still use a bunch of acronyms for their various weather instruments and readings. They have been actively revamping the geographic boundaries of "Weather Zones" (forecast areas), because California has such a diverse topography, and we have a lot of microclimates. So they're trying to target watches and warnings to more accurately reflect the geographic circumstances. People will know what's actually forecast for their immediate area, rather than a blanket statement for a broader region that is probably irrelevant.

All caps was another tech holdover, You can use 6bit character encoding.(room for 64, and an all caps keyboard is about 50 symbols then add some control chars like newline, bell, and setting up a connection.

What does UA stand for, in "UA pilot certifications"?

@@Ice_Karma Unmanned Aircraft or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. A drone basically. In Europe you are required to get certified in order to fly larger ones or commercially.

@@theAessaya Aha, thank you very much! If you don't mind me asking, just out of curiosity, are you getting certified to fly larger drones, to fly drones commercially, both, or something else?

@@Ice_Karma no problem :) Currently getting certifications for larger drones (have a DJI Air 2S, which is not yet officially certified for C1 category, so it counts as a medium-sized drone, being just over 500g in weight), and for BVLOS flight. Doing aerial photography mostly as a hobby, though if a commercial opportunity arises, I may think about it as well. With these certs I can potentially fly stuff up to 25kg in weight.

And nobody wants to rework the computer software to allow for changes.

​@@michaelmacdonell4834 I can promise you that for a lot of these legacy systems, the devs would rather want to rewrite the whole entire thing from scratch than to fix or add more junk to it. Legacy software is just awful to deal with in just about every way and eventually it will be completely unmaintainable. The reason they haven't been rewritten is _mostly_ because of greed.

The FAA is even worse. There's a reason there are so many alcoholic pilots. You can't take antidepressants without jumping through tens of thousands of dollars in loopholes and still might be denied (and even then, there are only four that they'll even consider at all--any pilot who took Wellbutrin or something during the lockdowns is barred permanently from flying now), and you can't get therapy to help you through major losses or else you're barred permanently, and you can't take a single hit on a vape to help you get to sleep without being barred for two solid years for one hit, but you can drink alcohol. As long as you claim that it's been at least eight hours and you think your BAC is half the legal driving limit, you're fine according to the FAA. Of those four antidepressants, they will consider Prozac since they say Prozac has no adverse side effects despite the well-known side effect of increased suicidal tendencies, and they say Wellbutrin makes people sleepy even though Wellbutrin tends to be a mild stimulant that wakes you up. I know women pilots who carefully scheduled non-necessary c-sections so they could time when they'd have help available in case they were hit with postpartum depression since PPD, which is temporary, can result in permanently being barred from flying, and so they were planning on how to conceal...i.e. handle it without medical help so there's no record...it if it happened to them so they could continue to work afterward to support their children. The FAA is so backward that a shockingly high percentage of pilots won't get medical help since even getting a diagnosis can bar you permanently. I have a buddy who suspects he has ADHD, but knows a diagnosis will fuck him. So, rather than get help and get meds to help with that, which would bar him, he's out there flying entirely intreated and hoping for the best, which the FAA is so fine with that they publish info on how to not take meds if you and your doctor think you need them. They literally tell you how to ignore your doctor.

@@mal2ksc Yes, indeed.

But..the problem with technological solutions is that they can become incredibly fragile. An accident, hacking, terrorism or even a solar storm could wreak havoc. Personally I hate seeing more and more of our living necessities going "online" because the crap will hit the fan when those systems go "offline" for any reason.

😅

Never underestimate the power of "But we've always done it that way" in a bureaucracy.

@@seafodder6129 so much this, it's the Bureaucracy, not trying to do it right.

You find bureaucracy in the private sector and boy is it just bad as what people think is purely a public service issue. I have had just as much problems with private sector organisations' bureaucracy as with the public sector. Why haven't airlines made an issue of this as well. I find the silence deafening.

They fixed the only thing that matters. They removed "Man". What are you, a bigot???? Lol

None of that excuses the crew's failure to spot the difference between a taxiway and a runway!

@@QuicknStraight way to miss the point.

@@valerierodger I haven't missed the point at all. The failure to read the NOTAM about that runway closure has nothing to do with a failure of basic observation and piloting skills that saw the crew mistake a taxiway for a runway.

The METAR format (which is awful) wasn't created for pilots, it was created for automated & computerized generation, transmission, and ingestion by meteorological systems. That's why the primary customers didn't care. The whole idea that pilots, who are already used to consuming cryptically formatted data in the form of NOTAMs, should be perfectly happy with raw METAR text was pure laziness.

@@DrewNorthup I’ll happily live with the metar/taf format if we can at least get an extra digit on the winds aloft. 😂

No, they won't fund anything(money isn't the problem anyway) and it will just add yet another layer of garbage to the trash heap. They will pass more terribly considered poorly written legislation with a fancy title for brownie points with voters. eg the 1500 hour copilot rule. Which just made all of the US airlines convert their international routes into code sharing agreements with foreign airlines (You buy the ticket on American airlines website but the international leg of the flight is actually on Pakistan Air.) Airlines that don't have the 1500 hour rule and in some cases overall a less effective training culture.

You should submit FOIAs to both the NTSB and FAA for a record of accidents and incidents where failure to follow NOTAMs, or NOTAM related issues were specifically highlighted as a contributing factor. You could also ask for statistics on what percentage of incidents and accidents involve NOTAM failures. Since it's an FOIA request, they only have like a month to get back to you, even if its just to say they're collecting data for a more thorough answer later. "We dont track that data and dont intend to acquire it" generally isnt an acceptable response by a government agency to FOIA requests, if that data shouldnt require much effort to get. And if they dont respond at all in the legally mandated timeframe, you can bring a lawsuit against the agency for violating the FOIA. I learned about all this when a blog called 20 Years Done submitted an FOIA to the united states air force demanding suicide rate data among service members broken down by AFSC (career field... The suspicion being that aircraft maintainers and security forces have way higher suicide rates). The USAF snubbed him, and failed to send ANY replies, until he started organizing a lawsuit against them for violating FOIA. Then the USAF quickly rushed collecting that data and published it themselves (not send it to him like theyre supposed to, they just published it to the public to try and get around any backlash over it taking an FOIA to get this info). They did a pretty crap job with the data, but it did show maintainers and secfo have higher suicide rates. Im pretty sure he's still continuing with the lawsuit against the USAF because of the way they acted about it. Forcing these agencies to look at their own problems with FOIAs, or otherwise face lawsuits, is one of the very few ways the average citizen can directly hold the US government accountable (which is why the recent Restrict Act absolving itself of FOIA accountability explicitly in the bill, despite already being blanket covered by "muh national security", is a really disconcerting problem. FOIA rights will be undermined if we keep allowing bills to just exempt themselves until FOIA is pointless).

I think it's absolutely because of the FAA lawyers. If they throw EVERYTHING into the NOTAM package and something gets missed that leads to an accident or incident, they can then say the pilot failed to review "all available information" relevant to the safety of the flight before taking off (as the FAR states you are required to), and therefore, whatever incident happened was the pilot's fault because he/she took off in violation of the FARs. It basically puts the pilot in a "Catch-22" situation: A) The pilot took off without reviewing all available information as required by the FAR - a violation. B) The pilot took off after reviewing all available information and must have disregarded the information - a violation. It's a perfect set up for the government's lawyers.

@@skyhawk_4526 I agree. I’m doing xcountry flights for my IR rating and the NOTAMS are ridiculous. I’m using foreflight so I get the brief, but also the schematics of what has changed. It’s kind of dystopian for flying in non Class A airspace. A total relook and refresh has to happen for our NOTAM system. This can’t continue and support our NAS properly.

From Canberra here 👋

From Mars

The FAA wont update their processes unless forced. Recently, the pandemic led to a law which required all government agencies to provide a method of recieving and submitting government forms online... The FAA essentially only maliciously complied without actually updating their processes. Many of the forms on their website are locked in some way, making digital signature impossible without some of the serious digital voodoo I has to pull to unlock the forms. Then I had to manually edit them to have typable text boxes because many of them just dont, since they expect you to do everything through snail mail still. Then in my case, I emailed them my change of registration form for an aircraft I bought. ... Filing this form costs 5 dollars to submit... They demand on the website that you pay this with a check in the mail, despite having an email you can send this form (or any form) through... There is NO online alternative to just pay this fee with debit card, despite the fact that SO MANY services exist that they could outsource online payment through. I asked in the email how I was supposed to pay online? They never answered me. 6 months later SIX MONTHS, after I emailed them, I get a change of registration extension BY SNAIL MAIL, apparently until I pay the fee... By snail mail... 5 f@cking dollars... Made me regret trying to handle buying my aircraft entirely through online communications and forms. Theyre MAKING ME mail them sh@t even though BY LAW, theyre supposed to accept forms purely online, since the pandemic started. And Im tired of running into this crap for everything in GA. I havent taken my plane off the ground yet, and Im already tired of it. The airport I bought it from, didnt have an email or printer, I had to get the airports phone number off a freaking airport info aggregate site, they expected me to do all the lease stuff and pay rent by mail, which took forever both directions. I mean, seriously, some facets of GA and the FAA feel like people got stuck in the 1960s and never left. It's ridiculous, it shouldnt take this long just to get my f@cking plane registered in my name. I've been paying insurance on it for 8 months already for christ sakes.

As long as no feminists are offended by the name it's all good.

@@Sonny_McMacsson Problem solved. We did it boys. Time to go home and get a beer.

The information in there contained warnings about the dangers in Somalia, Afghanistan, COVID, insurance requirements and the ban on Russian operators.

Even natural events such as solar storms.