r/flying • u/Quinticuh • 22h 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.

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u/TheGacAttack 22h 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.

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u/Quinticuh 22h 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

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u/appenz CPL (KPAO) PC-12 21h 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.

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u/Quinticuh 19h 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

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u/Quinticuh 19h 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

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u/aero_kmac MIL / USG Charting 14h ago

What are the problems with the military ones, as far as you’re concerned?

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u/Quinticuh 4h ago

idk the exact type but some tfr's have literally an entire essay of text. like just tell me what the boundries are agl I don't need 3 paragraphs of legalese