I've also wondered why cryptically abbrevated things like NOTAMS are still the way they are. It made sense in a teletype/telegraph world where brevity was worth time and money.
From wikipedia, this is a typical NOTAM:
A1234/06 NOTAMR A1212/06
Q)EGTT/QMXLC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/5129N00028W005
A)EGLL
B)0609050500
C)0704300500
E)DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN CL AND BLUE EDGE LGT. CTN ADZ
Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though.
You should try having to read several hundred of them before a long-haul duty!
Good luck trying to find the runway closure notam buried among the 400 reports of a crane within curvature-of-the-earth viewing range of an airport, or the 300 reports of birds that were once seen near, or somewhere near the runway.
So, as someone learning to fly, I can say that the METAR format is actually pretty quick to learn and the standardization does make it pretty quick to read, effectively acting as a shorthand. I'm not going to say it couldn't be improved, but it's standardized enough, and contains information that's immediately relevant to everything you're doing, so it's something you pick up quick.
The same is not really true of the NOTAMs, at least as far as I can tell. They're much less standardized, being mostly just plain text with weird awkward abbreviations and all caps that make them slower to scan. There's all kinds of mostly irrelevant metadata; and a lot of the time there are so many of them, most of them not really relevant, that it's really easy to lose track of what is important.
So, I don't think there's much pressing reason to change the METAR format, but oh god do they need to reform the NOTAM system, both the format and better filtering for actual relevance.
Note that this is coming from a student pilot, but I've also seen more experienced pilots express similar frustration with NOTAMs.
At this point it's basically historical/a mild hazing ritual. Everyone involved in aviation knows how to read this gibberish, and the next generation damn well better do the same!
Back in the day, it made sense. Say, back in the 60s, these messages were sent over a teletype at maybe 75 baud or less, roughly 10 characters per second. Now the Telex network was billed differently, but by comparison, at the time, domestic long distance rates could be over $1 per minute during the day, so it was on the order of 600 characters/$1. All the abbreviations probably reduce the data transmission by 80-90% over a fully spelled out transmission.
For things like hourly weather reports from every major airport, the abbreviations probably saved $50/hr or more on Telex charges every hour every day at major airports receiving them. That's not to mention the lower latency from getting weather reports sooner or not needing to install more Telex machines to keep up.
> Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though.
You're correct. It's straightforward for pilots. They can quickly read a NOTAM and understand everything.
Also, it's pretty standard and unambiguous worldwide.
That would be true in an ideal world, but pilots are also only human, so at least some of them will sometimes misread or ignore all that gibberish. To quote Wikipedia:
> In July 2017, Air Canada Flight 759 nearly crashed into four other airliners as it attempted to land on a San Francisco taxiway misidentified as a runway: the adjacent runway was closed but the information was buried in the NOTAM. As a consequence, in September 2018, from the findings during its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) stated NOTAMs were unintelligible and ignored, and recommended a more effective information presentation for better relevance. NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt described NOTAMs as "a bunch of garbage that nobody pays any attention to". This led to an ICAO initiative to reform the NOTAM system.
I prefer the encoded version of weather, TAF (Terminal Area Forecast). That makes it easier to visually scan down and see how the weather is forecast to change in the terminal area. (Is it improving? Getting worse? Is there a time when the winds change significantly [meaning a frontal passage is happening]?)
Same for a time sequence of METARs, especially when you cross-compare the METARs to the TAF (to know if the forecast is holding or was blown.)
Visually scanning the encoded text of weather is easier. (The entire NOTAM system is a mess, encoded or not.)
Here's Indy's METARs, showing generally good weather with broken clouds, developing into light rain-mist-solid overcast, then heavy rain-mist-overcast, then light rain-mist-broken clouds. (Read from bottom-up.) I'd quickly read that as improving and generally following the TAF (below it), meaning the forecast is probably a good one.
This all seems quite reminiscent of when the US National Weather Service used to issue super-cryptic forecast background summaries, and then slowly non-meterologists started building systems to decode them.
And for the record, like Python code, the spaces are significant, because the fields have a fixed order and width. (Although there are a couple of places where a field is specified by a number denoting its sized, followed by the contents)
Back in 2004 when I was involved in airtraffic control operations, teletype was still there as backup for the PC based solution. Don't know the status 18 years later
By the way the software used was based on win3.1 with a secondary partition with Linux and relevant software which was the secondary option as their audience was not accustomed to Linux UI at the time - that is their words
> Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff.
Not just regular pilots, but also (here in the EU) operators of drones under A2 classification.
And let me tell you, it sucks, particularly if you're from anywhere else but the US and never heard of units like feet, miles and inches and what they mean outside of "this exists, is only used in the US and that's it" once in school. The only thing in a standard unit there is the temperature, and that I guess is only the case because "0C" is way more obvious as the freezing point of water.
I get it, this dates back to hundreds of years of nautical practice, but everybody else has long since shifted to metric...
It's because being standardized is more important than being easy to read.
Now that we can make clients that expand those codes for you, people are working towards a more standardized, more verbose language with a much larger lookup table and computer-friendly separators.
You answered your own question. Being able to read those things is part a pilot's training and daily job. Complaining about this from the outside is like me critizing Python or something else I have not the slightest clue about.
From wikipedia, this is a typical NOTAM:
Likewise METARs (weather reports): Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though.