The NOTAM you scrolled past and the closed runway waiting at your destination

NOTAMs — Notices to Air Missions — are the most skipped and least understood part of cross-country flight planning. They fill the gap between your sectional chart (updated every 56 days) and what you’ll actually find at the airport today. Runway closures, lighting outages, TFRs, GPS interference, parachute operations — it’s all buried in that wall of coded text. Skipping them doesn’t save time; it just moves the surprise from your kitchen table to the cockpit.

Why Do NOTAMs Matter for Cross-Country Planning?

A NOTAM is a notice issued by the FAA or airport management to alert pilots about conditions affecting flight safety. They cover:

• Runway and taxiway closures
• Navaid outages
• Lighting system failures
• Airspace restrictions and TFRs
• Obstacles like cranes near the field
• GPS interference testing

The FAA expects you to check them. FAR 91.103, the preflight action regulation, requires you to become familiar with “all available information concerning that flight.” That includes NOTAMs. The Airman Certification Standards for the private pilot cross-country planning task specifically calls out the use of current and appropriate publications and NOTAMs. Hand your examiner a flight plan without NOTAM review, and you’ve got a problem.

Where Do You Get NOTAMs?

Several sources are available:

• 1-800-WX-BRIEF (Leidos Flight Service by phone)
• Leidos Flight Service online
• Electronic flight bag apps like ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, or FlyQ

Most EFB apps pull NOTAMs automatically when you file or brief a route. That convenience has a downside — when the app tucks 50 NOTAMs into a tab you have to tap to open, it’s easy to think you’ll check them later. Later never comes.

How Do You Read the NOTAM Format?

Nobody finds NOTAMs easy to read — not students, not experienced pilots, not airline crews. The format is genuinely terrible. But it follows a consistent structure:

1. NOTAM number (just an identifier)
2. Affected location (four-letter airport identifier)
3. Keyword indicating the category: Runway, Taxiway, Airspace, Obstruction, Navigation
4. The actual content (e.g., “RWY 18/36 CLSD” or “VASI RWY 27 OTS”)
5. Effective dates and times in Zulu

The keywords are your best scanning tool. When you’re staring at 20 NOTAMs for a busy airport, scan keywords first: Runway, Approach, Lighting, Airspace. Those directly affect whether you can get in and out as planned.

Common NOTAM Abbreviations You Need to Know

All times are Zulu — convert to local time when checking effective periods.

What Happens When You Skip the NOTAMs?

Consider this scenario: you’re planning a trip to a towered airport 150 nautical miles away with two runways — 12/30 and 5/23. Winds favor Runway 12. You brief the pattern entry and feel good. But buried in NOTAM number 6 of 14, there’s a notice that Runway 12/30 is closed for resurfacing through the end of the month.

Now you’re landing on Runway 5 or 23 regardless of wind. That runway might be shorter, might have a displaced threshold you weren’t expecting, and the crosswind component just went from manageable to marginal. All of that was available on the ground, where you had time to think and adjust. Skip the NOTAMs, and you find out on the ATIS 20 miles out while replanning in a bouncing cockpit on a busy frequency.

Lighting NOTAMs are another trap. You’re planning a late afternoon flight that might push into early evening. The destination has pilot-controlled lighting — which you’re counting on. But there’s a NOTAM saying it’s out of service. Arrive after dark, and you may not see the runway environment well enough to land safely. That single NOTAM changes your entire timeline: leave earlier or pick a different airport.

How Do TFRs and GPS NOTAMs Affect Your Route?

TFRs show up in your NOTAM briefing and can appear after your initial briefing. Presidential movements, stadium events, military exercises, wildfire areas — these can pop up between your morning brief and your afternoon departure. A briefing pulled at 0700 might be missing a TFR issued at noon.

GPS NOTAMs are routinely dismissed but shouldn’t be. The military regularly tests GPS jamming in certain areas and publishes NOTAMs about it. If you’re relying on GPS for navigation or even situational awareness, knowing it might be unreliable along your route is critical — especially if you haven’t spent much time navigating without it.

What’s the Most Efficient System for Reviewing NOTAMs?

This system takes about 10 minutes and eliminates destination surprises:

1. Destination airport first. This is where the highest-impact surprises hide — closed runways, missing lighting, ramp construction. If you can’t land where you planned, you need to know before anything else.
2. Departure airport second. Even if it’s your home field, don’t assume nothing has changed. Closed taxiways, beacon outages — check them.
3. Alternate airports third. Fuel stops and diversion fields along your route need NOTAMs too. Diverting to a backup with the same problem helps no one.
4. Area and Flight Data Center NOTAMs fourth. These cover TFRs, GPS testing, airspace changes, and special activity areas affecting your enroute segment.
5. Check again before departure. If more than a couple of hours have passed since your briefing, refresh. A quick call to Flight Service or an app refresh takes two minutes.

Should I Just Let ForeFlight Handle NOTAMs for Me?

EFB apps are getting better at parsing and presenting NOTAM information. ForeFlight flags runway closures and puts them right on the airport page. But the app is interpreting the NOTAM for you, and sometimes that interpretation misses nuance.

An app might show a runway as open because the closure is intermittent — scheduled for specific hours — and you happen to be looking outside those hours. If your arrival time shifts by 30 minutes, that intermittent closure suddenly matters.

Use the apps. They’re fantastic tools. But develop the skill of reading raw NOTAM text, at least for critical items at your destination. Your checkride examiner will hand you a printed briefing with raw NOTAMs and ask you to interpret them. That’s an ACS task you can’t outsource to an app.

Key Takeaways

• NOTAMs bridge the gap between your 56-day chart cycle and real-world airport conditions — they are not optional reading
• FAR 91.103 requires NOTAM review, and the ACS tests it on your checkride
• Scan by keyword (Runway, Lighting, Airspace) to efficiently triage long NOTAM lists
• Check destination NOTAMs first — that’s where the highest-impact surprises live
• Refresh before departure if more than two hours have passed since your original briefing

For the full NOTAM decoding guide, reference the FAA Aeronautical Information Manual, Chapter 5, Section 1. The FAA’s NOTAM search tool also allows queries by airport, route, or geographic area — both are worth bookmarking.