Best Notam I've ever seen

A plain-language NOTAM posted at Hawarden Airport (EGNR) in Wales on June 15, 2025, has drawn attention for its stark departure from standard aeronautical notification formatting. Rather than the terse, acronym-dense encoding that characterizes the global NOTAM system — replete with coded location identifiers, UTC time windows, and abbreviated hazard descriptors — the notice reads simply: "Everyone please make sure not to hit the fence on approach to runway 22. Cheers." The emoji and casual sign-off confirm this is an informally issued local advisory rather than an official NOTAM filed through the UK's NATS or the standard ICAO distribution chain, but the underlying operational concern it communicates is entirely real: a fence in the approach environment for Runway 22 at Hawarden constitutes a genuine obstacle hazard for arriving traffic.

Hawarden is not a minor strip. The airport sits adjacent to the Airbus wing manufacturing facility and regularly handles ferry flights for A320- and A330-family wings as well as corporate, charter, and light general aviation traffic. Runway 22 presents a relatively short, constrained approach environment, and any fixed obstacle — fence, equipment, or otherwise — near the threshold demands pilot awareness, particularly for crews flying the approach for the first time or operating in reduced visibility. The fact that the hazard was communicated through a handwritten or informally posted notice rather than a formal NOTAM suggests either a temporary or local condition that did not rise to the threshold for official filing, or a gap in the aerodrome's notification procedures. Either way, the advisory reflects a real obstacle that pilots should factor into approach planning and stabilization criteria.

The notice has resonated widely because it satirizes, perhaps unintentionally, one of the most persistent frustrations in professional aviation: the near-unreadable density of the formal NOTAM system. Standard NOTAMs require pilots and dispatchers to parse strings like "OBST CRANE (ASN 2025-ANE-1234-OE) 510.5FT (200.5FT AGL) FLAGGED AND LGTD" — a format designed for machine parsing and global distribution but notoriously hostile to rapid human comprehension during preflight planning. The FAA's NOTAM Improvement Program, launched in the aftermath of the 2022 Washington NOTAM system outage and accelerated by congressional pressure, has explicitly targeted exactly this problem, pushing toward plain-language formatting and improved filtering tools. The Hawarden notice, while tongue-in-cheek, inadvertently demonstrates what the end-state of that reform movement might look like at its most distilled.

For working pilots and flight operations teams, the post serves as a useful reminder that informal local advisories — posted at FBOs, pinned to crew room boards, or passed via ATIS remarks — can carry operationally critical information that never enters the formal NOTAM distribution chain. Thorough preflight briefing at unfamiliar aerodromes should include direct engagement with local aerodrome information sources, not just a NOTAM filter query. At smaller European fields in particular, where aerodrome operators may lack the resources or training for rapid formal NOTAM filing, the gap between what is known on the ground and what reaches a crew's electronic flight bag can be significant. The humor of the Hawarden notice lands precisely because it exposes that gap in a disarming way — but the fence, presumably, is still there.