'Bunch of garbage': Campaign to ease pilot overload from antiquated safety warnings

When it came time to land at San Francisco on July 7, 2017, the pilots of an Air Canada jet could not recall a critical piece of information buried on page eight of a 27-page briefing package: the closure of one of the airport’s two runways. Mistaking the runway they were cleared to land on for the one that was closed, the fatigued pilots chose the wrong reference point and lined up to land on a parallel taxiway instead. They came within seconds of colliding with four planes. More than three years later, a global campaign has been launched to improve aviation safety by reducing the kind of information overload experienced by the pilots of Air Canada 759. The reform of the more than century-old system of Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) - originally modelled after Notices to Mariners - is part of a wider push to make aviation simpler, particularly in the wake of two Boeing 737 MAX crashes. For long-haul flights, there can be up to 200 pages of NOTAMs for pilots to review on paper or an iPad, many of them as irrelevant as general bird hazard warnings, grass-cutting at airports or low-altitude construction obstacles relevant only to helicopters and light planes. For decades, such standardised bulletins issued by national air navigation authorities – part of a global safety regime managed by countries through the United Nations’ aviation agency - have helped to keep aviation safe. But the industry has grown so large that the noise created by redundant warnings is increasingly seen as a hazard. Story has more.<br/>