Ah yes… The NOTAM. The ‘Notice to Air Men (Women)’ which most general aviation…actually all pilots, are meant to examine prior to taking off, but in all honesty, seldom do. Part of the reason being, that it seems such a mission to find them, and then understanding what on earth all those letters, and abbreviations mean, requires a whole can of energy drink for courage. So in the interests of preventing possible embarrassment or worse, we are going to show you how to read these notices…

Firstly, you need to find them. In South Africa, where the sun shines, and where we are from, this is not obvious but there are options. You can find them on the SACAA website here or, once you are signed up, on File2Fly here. 

Next, you will see that there are pages and pages of these things. You firstly need to know which series are relevant to you, and you will find the series in the header. This is what they represent:

A – Information of concern to long or medium range flights, given selected international distribution.
B – Full information on all aerodromes/heliports, facilities and procedures available for use in international civil aviation and given international distribution to adjacent states only.
C – Information of concern to aircraft other than those engaged in international civil aviation and given national distribution only.

So, essentially, if you are flying within the borders, you will be looking at series B and C.

The first letter below, indicates the series, then 4 numbers which indicate the NOTAM number, and after the / you have the year.

NOTAMN – The N at the end tells us that this is a new NOTAM. A C would indicate that the NOTAM is cancelled, or R which would indicate a replacement.

Q – Qualifier:

FACA indicates the Cape Town FIR /
QPCR indicates Air Traffic Procedure changes – contingency procedures (PC) temporarily replaced by (CR) /
IV – Applies to IFR and VFR traffic /
NBO – For the immediate attention of aircraft operators, for inclusion in PIB’s and operationally significant for IFR flights / AE – Aerodrome, En-route /
000/999 – Default numbers for lower and upper limits expressed as a flight level (not applicable). /
3359S02537E005 – Provides the geographical centre of the area involved, with the last digit indicating the distance – 5NM.

A – ICAO Aerodrome indicator, in this case FAPE (Port Elizabeth)

B – Date/time group (UTC) when NOTAM becomes effective. In this case 20 December 2018, at 08.36 UTC.

C – Date/time group (UTC) when the NOTAM ceases to be effective. EST indicates that this is the estimated date, but the NOTAM will remain in place until a cancellation or replacement is issued.

E – NOTAM message in ICAO abbreviations. You can download ICAO 8400 which contains all the abbreviations here.

On the SA CAA website you have two documents available for download – the summary, and the PIB (Pre-flight Information Bulletin). A Pre-Flight Information Bulletin (PIB) is a presentation of current NOTAM information of operational significance prepared prior to flight. It contains a recapitulation of current NOTAM and other information of an urgent character and is made available to flight crews in plain language.

As an example from the PIB we will use FALE, King Shaka International in Durban, because the beach is always a nice place to go…

First, the left column:

AGA – Aerodrome subject. This can be followed by L – Lighting; M – Movement and landing area or F – Facilities and services.

OTH – Indicates a subject outside of the standard categories.

NAV – Subject relating to navigation safety

In a PIB, the A is omitted as this is included in the header section, i.e. We are told the airport code and name in the header.

B – Date/time group (UTC) when NOTAM becomes effective. In this case 20 December 2018, at 08.36 UTC.

C – Date/time group (UTC) when the NOTAM ceases to be effective. EST indicates that this is the estimated date, but the NOTAM will remain in place until a cancellation or replacement is issued.

E – NOTAM message in ICAO abbreviations. You can download ICAO 8400 which contains all the abbreviations here.

Finally, if you feel that this is all too much to remember, you are not alone! Thankfully, technology has come to our rescue again, and there are a number of NOTAM decoder Apps available for Android and IOS that will do all the decoding for you, but at least now you can impress your examiner at your next revalidation by knowing the layout of a NOTAM.