Expressing frustration with aviation’s cumbersome notices to airmen (NOTAM) system, U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Vice Chair Bruce Landsberg told a Flight Safety Foundation seminar today that he hopes the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) can conclude its decades-long effort to modernize the system within the year.
“When do we get this fixed?” Landsberg asked in his keynote address to the Foundation’s 66th annual Business Aviation Safety Summit, (BASS), held virtually this year and jointly presented with the National Business Aviation Association.
As a prime example of the problems caused by the current NOTAMs system, which often turns up numerous NOTAMS that are irrelevant to a particular flight and in which individual entries are loaded with often-indecipherable abbreviations, Landsberg cited the July 7, 2017, nighttime incident in which an Air Canada Airbus A320 lined up to land on a taxiway at San Francisco International Airport. Four airliners …
