A NOTAM (officially meaning Notice to Air Men, as used by the ICAO, FAA and the EASA; politically corrected by the British CAA to mean instead Notice to Aviation (NOTAN), with no accounting for the M; and also previously known as "Notice to Air Missions" in the United States) is a notice filed with an aviation authority to alert aircraft pilots of potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight. NOTAMs are notices or advisories that contain information concerning the establishment, conditions or change in any aeronautical facility, service, procedure or hazard, the timely knowledge of which may be essential to personnel and systems concerned with flight operations. NOTAMs are created and transmitted by government agencies and airport operators under guidelines specified by Annex 15: Aeronautical Information Services of the Convention on International Civil Aviation (CICA). A NOTAM is filed with an aviation authority to alert aircraft pilots of any hazards en route or at a specific location, or Flight Information Region. The authority, in turn, provides a means of disseminating relevant NOTAMs to pilots.
History The acronym NOTAM came into common use following the ratification of the CICA, which went into effect on 4 April 1947, although early recorded use of the "Notice to Airmen" heading can be found in Flight International magazine in the UK. Notices to airmen were normally published in a regular publication by each country's air authorities, as in the UK. Several developments and amendments to the CICA have resulted in the more automated system available today. At some point in the past, the NOTAM system became web-aware. 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. In September 2018, as a consequence of the findings of its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) stated NOTAMs were unintelligible and ignored. The NTSB recommended more effective presentation of relevant information. NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt described NOTAMs as "a bunch of garbage that nobody pays any attention to". This led to an initiative of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to reform the NOTAM system. In early 2014, Russia occupied Crimea and as part of the takeover, Russia issued a new code, URFV to cover the Crimean airspace. The Ukrainian air controller has since been forced to issue NOTAMs under the UKFV code (belonging to Simferopol FIR), basically a verbatim repeater. As a result, all the UKFV NOTAMs advising about this area affix this note:
DUE ACTIVITY PUBLISHED BY RUSSIAN FEDERATION. THE PUBLICATION BY RUSSIAN FEDERATION OF INFORMATION RELATED TO AIRSPACE UNDER RESPONSIBILITY OF UKRAINE DOES NOT COMPLY WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THE ICAO AIR NAVIGATION PLAN - EUROPEAN REGION (DOC 7754) AND THE ICAO ANNEXES 11 AND 15.
In the run-up to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities closed large parts of the Black Sea, the Kerch Strait, and almost the entire Sea of Azov "for missile and artillery live fire exercises." A spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry protested the Russian NOTAMs over this unprecedentedly large exercise area, which essentially obstructed international shipping and had economic consequences for Ukrainian ports such as Mariupol. From December 2021 until February 2025, the meaning of the acronym was modified to "Notice to Air Missions" in the United States.
Modernization - US NOTAM Management Service Should the antiquated US NOTAM Service (USNS) fail, the FAA orders a ground stop for all US air traffic, as highlighted in the 'Incidents' section below. Full national ground stops impose severe economic and transportation penalties. To mitigate future incidents, the 118th Congress of the United States passed into law H.R.346 - NOTAM Improvement Act of 2023 which requires the FAA to conduct a taskforce by 30 September 2024 determining how to modernize both USNS and the Foreign NOTAM Service (FNS) in the US . The FAA's NOTAM Taskforce determined the need for a new, modernized NOTAM service and conducted a competitive prototyping Other Transaction Authority with industry through March of 2025 when they awarded the work to CGI Federal. CGI Federal began work on a FISMA High Baseline accredited, fully containerized microservice, cloud-native, and ICAO compatible web application and infrastructure called "Notice to Airmen Modernization Service" (NMS) under the direction of a FAA Project Management Office dedicated to this task. NMS delivered initial machine-to-machine USNS API capability to a select group of government and commercial users on 30 September 2025. NMS launches global USNS service to individual public, organizational, and API users in mid-April 2026 with FNS service expected to be fully available by early fall 2026.
Usage NOTAMs are issued (and reported) for several reasons, such as:
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
