Ninety-One One Oh Three, Preflight Action, and the Law That Says You Must Read the Whole Oshkosh NOTAM Before You Ever Touch the Runway

Federal Aviation Regulation 91.103 requires every pilot in command to become familiar with “all available information” concerning a flight before departure. During AirVenture week, that legally includes the entire Oshkosh AirVenture NOTAM cover to cover. Launch for Wittman Regional Airport without having read it, and you are in violation of the rule before you ever release the brakes.

What Does FAR 91.103 Actually Require?

In plain language, the regulation states that each pilot in command shall, before beginning a flight, become familiar with all available information concerning that flight. Not some of it. Not the convenient parts. All of it.

The rule then names specifics. For any flight, you must review weather reports and forecasts, know your fuel requirements, identify alternatives available if the flight can’t be completed as planned, and be aware of any known traffic delays advised by the tower.

For flights not in the vicinity of an airport and for any flight operating under IFR, you must also know the runway lengths at airports of intended use and your aircraft’s takeoff and landing distance data.

That’s the whole regulation. Five short sentences, buried in Part 91, that carry more weight during AirVenture than almost any other rule in the book.

Why “All Available Information” Is the Key Phrase

Those two words - all available information - were written deliberately. This is a broad-duty regulation. It doesn’t hand you a checklist you can stop reading at the bottom. It places the burden on you, the pilot in command, to go find everything that reasonably bears on the safety of that flight. Once information exists and is available to you, you are responsible for knowing it.

That is exactly why the phrase matters the week of AirVenture.

Is Reading the Oshkosh NOTAM Legally Required?

Yes. Each year the FAA and the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) publish a document officially titled the AirVenture Notice - what most pilots simply call the NOTAM. It is not a paragraph or a page. It is a booklet of dozens of pages that completely rewrites how you fly into that corner of Wisconsin for the duration of the show.

It changes the arrival, the frequencies, the altitudes, the airspeeds, the spacing, the colored marks you land on, and the way you communicate - or more accurately, how you mostly don’t communicate - on the radio.

That NOTAM is available information concerning your flight. It exists, it’s free, it’s posted online and in the apps, and EAA hands it to you. Under 91.103, that means reading it is not a courtesy or a nice-to-have. It is a federal requirement. Depart for Wittman Field without having read it, and you are already in violation of 91.103 - parked on the ramp, before you’ve even moved.

The regulation and the safety here are the same thing. The rule exists precisely because the information keeps you alive.

How Should I Read the AirVenture NOTAM?

Don’t read it like a magazine - front to back, one time, the night before. Read it three times, each time with a different question in mind.

First pass - read for the shape of the thing. Understand the big picture. For most pilots arriving at Oshkosh, the procedure keys off a small town called Ripon and a railroad town called Fisk. You fly a specific course, at a specific altitude, at a specific speed, following a set of railroad tracks. A controller at Fisk finds your airplane and talks to you. You don’t key the mic to answer - you rock your wings to acknowledge. On this pass, you just want the story.

Second pass - read for the numbers, and write them down. The arrival altitude, the target airspeed, the slower speed for slower airplanes, the arrival frequency, the tower frequency after handoff, the runway assignments, and the colored dots painted down the pavement. They’ll tell you to land on the green dot or the orange dot and touch down on a spot - not in the first third of the runway. Put all of it on a kneeboard card. You will not be reading a booklet at 135 mph with airplanes stacked ahead of and behind you.

Third pass - read for the what-ifs. What do you do if the arrival is full and they wave you off? What’s the hold procedure? Where does the balked landing go? What are the exact words and actions for lost radio contact? What’s the plan if the weather drops and they suspend the VFR arrival? This read separates the pilots who handle a surprise from the pilots who become one.

How Do I Apply 91.103 to the Rest of an Oshkosh Trip?

The NOTAM is the big one, but it isn’t the only available information. Work through the rest of the regulation:

Weather. The reg names it first for a reason. On a long cross-country to a fly-in, weather isn’t one look - it’s a briefing you build over days. Watch the forecast for Oshkosh, every airport along your route, and your fuel stops. Use the Graphical Forecasts for Aviation, terminal forecasts, and winds aloft. It’s all available information, and it all falls under the rule.

Fuel requirements. Plan fuel as though the field might not be available the moment you arrive - because sometimes it isn’t. A wave-off, a hold, or stacked-up weather burns gas you didn’t plan on. The legal minimum reserve is your floor, not your target. Know your fuel decision point on the map before you launch.

Alternatives available. The regulation is literally telling you to have a plan B before you go. Pick, on the ground, the airports around Oshkosh where you’ll divert if the arrival closes or the weather turns - Fond du Lac, the outlying fields, wherever fits your airplane and fuel. You don’t invent a divert plan while getting waved off over Ripon with forty other airplanes.

Known traffic delays. It’s the busiest airport in the world this week - consider yourself briefed. The NOTAM and the show’s information channels will tell you when arrival volume is heavy, when the flow is paused, and when there are ground stops.

Runway data. Know the runway lengths at Wittman and your airplane’s landing distance. You may be asked to land long, touch down on a dot two-thirds down the runway, or exit at a specific taxiway with an airplane right behind you. Knowing your numbers cold lets you accept that instruction with confidence instead of guessing.

How Does 91.103 Show Up on a Checkride?

Preflight planning lives in the Airman Certification Standards (ACS), and many students don’t realize it. On the oral portion of your private or instrument checkride, the examiner isn’t looking for memorized trivia - they want to see that you can gather all available information and turn it into a go / no-go decision.

Expect to be asked directly what 91.103 requires. You may be handed a scenario - a cross-country to an unfamiliar field, perhaps even a special event like this one - and watched to see how you find what you need. The examiner wants a pilot who treats information-gathering as a duty: one who reads the NOTAM, and who has a divert field and a fuel plan before the engine turns.

Walk an examiner through an Oshkosh arrival plan - NOTAM in hand, altitudes, speeds, diverts, and lost-comm procedures all sorted - and you’ve demonstrated everything 91.103 asks for by living it.

The Reframe That Makes the NOTAM Worth It

Flight training is hard, expensive, and full of paper, and a booklet-length NOTAM makes people groan - especially stacked on top of the longest cross-country many pilots fly all year. It isn’t easy. But here’s the reframe: that NOTAM isn’t busywork invented to ruin your July. It’s the distilled, hard-won knowledge of how to safely funnel roughly ten thousand airplanes onto one field without them hitting each other.

Every procedure reads the way it does because someone once learned the hard way why it needed to be there. When you read it, you aren’t just complying with a regulation - you’re inheriting a lifetime of other pilots’ experience, for free, before you need it.

Make 91.103 a Physical Habit

Turn the regulation into an action, not an intention. Before every flight that leaves the pattern, sit down and ask out loud: what is all the available information for this trip, and have I actually looked at it? Weather. Fuel. Alternates. Traffic. Runways. And any special procedure or NOTAM that changes how this airport works today.

Write the answers down. If you can’t answer one of them, you are not done planning - and you are not legal to go.

Practice this on the easy flights, the two-hundred-dollar-hamburger runs, and it becomes second nature on the day it really counts - like the day you point the nose at Wittman Field with the whole aviation world already circling overhead.

The regulation text comes straight out of Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations, and the arrival procedures live in the official AirVenture Notice published by the FAA and EAA. Read the real thing, every word, before you fly it.

Key Takeaways

• FAR 91.103 requires the pilot in command to become familiar with all available information before any flight - a broad, self-imposed duty, not a fixed checklist.
• During AirVenture, the Oshkosh NOTAM (AirVenture Notice) counts as available information, so reading the entire booklet is legally required, not optional.
• Read the NOTAM three times: once for the overall arrival (Ripon/Fisk), once to write down the numbers, and once for the emergency and lost-comm procedures.
• Apply 91.103 in full: weather, fuel with real margin, named divert airports, traffic delays, and runway/landing-distance data.
• Preflight planning is an ACS checkride item - examiners want to see information-gathering treated as a duty, so build the habit on routine flights.