Ridiculous NOTAM

The screenshot circulating among pilots highlights a persistent and worsening problem with the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system: the proliferation of overly broad Parachute Jump Area (PJA) NOTAMs that provide minimal actionable value while consuming enormous volumes of airspace. The example cited describes a PJA NOTAM with a ceiling of just 65 feet AGL but a radius spanning 100 nautical miles — an area exceeding 7,500 square nautical miles — issued as active 24 hours a day. For context, a NOTAM warning of activity at 65 feet is operationally irrelevant to the vast majority of powered aircraft above pattern altitude, yet the geographic footprint is so large that it appears in preflight briefings for flights that have no realistic chance of encountering a parachute descending to that altitude anywhere near the specified area. This mismatch between the actual hazard (a low-altitude, localized drop zone) and the published scope (a state-spanning circle) is emblematic of a system that errs heavily toward overinclusion at the expense of precision.

For working pilots, this matters because NOTAM overload is a well-documented contributor to information fatigue and, ultimately, to missed safety-critical notices. Airline, corporate, and charter crews are required to review NOTAM packages before every flight, and dispatchers and briefers must sift through pages of TFRs, obstacle notices, runway closures, and PJA activations to extract what's actually relevant to a given route and altitude. When a large percentage of that content consists of NOTAMs with grossly inflated lateral or vertical dimensions — often issued this way by drop zone operators or FSDOs as a defensive, "cover every possibility" measure — pilots and dispatchers begin to develop a habitual discounting of NOTAM content generally. This is the same psychological phenomenon behind "alert fatigue" in other safety-critical industries: when the signal-to-noise ratio degrades enough, operators start pattern-matching against expected boilerplate rather than reading each notice on its merits. In a system where a genuinely critical NOTAM — a closed runway, a temporary obstruction, a TFR for a VIP movement — is formatted identically to a low-priority skydiving operation with a wildly exaggerated footprint, the risk is that the important notice gets scanned past along with the noise.

The trend of PJA NOTAM inflation reflects broader defensive tendencies across FAA notice-issuing processes, where operators and facilities lean toward maximal lateral and vertical buffers to avoid any liability exposure, without much operational check on proportionality. Unlike TFRs, which the FAA has worked to standardize and, in some cases, geofence more precisely (particularly around stadium and VIP movement TFRs), PJA and other recurring-activity NOTAMs have not seen the same scrutiny, and there's little institutional pressure to right-size them since the parachute operators requesting them bear none of the downstream cost imposed on the broader pilot population. The FAA has periodically discussed NOTAM reform — including past initiatives to improve NOTAM sorting, prioritization, and digital presentation through systems like PilotWeb and FAA's NOTAM Search — but reform efforts have focused mostly on formatting and accessibility (fixing the all-caps, jargon-heavy legacy text format) rather than on the underlying problem of oversized or overly conservative geographic and temporal scope.

This ties into a broader conversation in the pilot community about the reliability of preflight information systems more generally, echoing complaints seen after high-profile NOTAM system outages, including the January 2023 nationwide NOTAM system failure that grounded U.S. departures. That event triggered renewed scrutiny of the NOTAM architecture's technical fragility, but the deeper cultural issue — that the system generates too much low-value data for pilots to reliably extract the handful of NOTAMs that actually matter for a given flight — remains largely unaddressed. Until the FAA or industry stakeholders impose stricter proportionality standards on notices like PJA NOTAMs (matching the geographic and vertical scope to the actual activity rather than allowing blanket, worst-case buffers), pilots and flight departments will continue to rely on manual judgment, EFB filtering tools, and dispatcher triage to manage the noise. That reliance on human filtering is itself a latent risk factor, and incidents involving overlooked NOTAMs — whether for closed runways, unlit towers, or active TFRs — will keep reinforcing calls for a more disciplined, risk-proportionate approach to how these notices are drafted and disseminated.