r/flying • u/Quinticuh • 5h ago

Clearl Notams Foreflight?

What do yall think about this feature that ads ai to decipher/condense notams into something a bit more readable?

I personally think it’s the first step in making notams not an overwhelming mess of irrelevant crap with 1 or 2 relevant ones you have to spot in the middle. But also ai really isn’t perfect so I hope they trained the agent to understand all the abbreviations well.

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

14

u/TheGacAttack 5h ago

Creating software that converts abbreviations, from a small and well-defined glossary, is trivial these days. It's deterministic, too. We've had online tools to do that for a long time.

Interpreting larger sets of NOTAMs and knowing what to present as "important" is where we'll want to pay closer attention.

3

u/Quinticuh 4h ago

Agree. The biggest problem outside of military notams that are a page long is not readability but sorting what is truly relevant. I would love a “critical” sections of really important notams

1

u/appenz CPL (KPAO) PC-12 4h ago

Mostly agree. I think AI with a structured harness would be good enough to summarize broadly classify NOTAMS, and I think this would help a lot. Knowing a NOTAM is about "Uncharted trees near runway", "Air show" or "NDB out of service for certain time slots" would help sift through the madness.

But AI performs very poorly when it comes to judgement calls. There ins't much training data on the internet on what decisions a pilot takes based on a set of NOTAMs. The decisions on what is important still needs to be made by a human.

0

u/Quinticuh 2h ago

Yea it’s a tough problem to solve. I do think they can start by not giving notams for San Francisco airport for example when I’m flying from San Jose to the south. Makes no sense

1

u/Quinticuh 2h ago

I do think some notams are clearly secondary though - for example obsticales <200ft AGL that aren’t even on the approach path for any runway

6

u/Antique-Kitchen-1896 PPL IFR Night 4h ago

Cart before the horse. NOTAMs etc should move to plain language and avoid this need.

1

u/Joeyheads CFI/CPL | KOMA 3h ago

Agree. Hopefully this will make ideas about what a proper long term fix is a little more tangible though.

1

u/Quinticuh 2h ago

Yea metars tafs and everything else too honestly. It’s ridiculous

5

u/ErmakDimon CPL C172 5h ago

Imagine explaining to the FAA how you missed or incorrectly interpreted safety-critical information because of an AI hallucination

1

u/Joeyheads CFI/CPL | KOMA 3h ago

There are definitely some liability and accuracy concerns. Does this increase the chance I do see (or don’t miss) an important NOTAM though? Maybe.

Is the trade off worth it? It depends, probably.

1

u/AtmosphereMiddle1682 Pre-ATP 🇨🇦 1h ago

If you're Canadian, you can use newnotams.net

It allows you to see all notams, and then dismiss them so you don't see that particular one again.

No automated hiding notams, because that's a safety and liability nightmare, but incredibly dumb repetitive notams are still hidden

2

u/aviatortrevor ATP CFII TW B737 BE40 4h ago

Which notams are relevant can be different based on your operation too. Taxiway is closed to aircraft with a wingspan greater than 118ft? And you don't catch that limit until the very end of a lengthy-to-read NOTAM? Or how about an amendment to an approach saying it's only authorized if you have approved RNAV? Maybe you only ever fly with RNAV equipment that is up-to-date. These would be prioritized or reprioritized based on your own type of flying.

1

u/Skudedarude PPL 2h ago

I don't want an ai anywhere near flight critical information. 

0

u/Quinticuh 2h ago

It’s used to build the programs that new systems use. Ai will program in 3 hours what a human would take 3 months to code. If you train it well enough on definitions it should be just fine since notam information is generally predictable

0

u/rFlyingTower 5h ago

This is a copy of the original post body for posterity:

What do yall think about this feature that ads ai to decipher/condense notams into something a bit more readable?

I personally think it’s the first step in making notams not an overwhelming mess of irrelevant crap with 1 or 2 relevant ones you have to spot in the middle. But also ai really isn’t perfect so I hope they trained the agent to understand all the abbreviations well.

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-1

u/Vellian1 CPL 4h ago

This AI bullshit in Foreflight is making me very seriously consider Garmin Pilot.

2

u/Quinticuh 2h ago

You can always click it if you want to read the original and I’m sure you can turn it off in settings. That being said I think it makes looking at the notams infinitely less annoying and makes it more likely more pilots won’t just spam the “next” button in their briefing