Time out for NOTAM

Last week, air traffic in the US and surrounding areas was disrupted. It was total travel chaos. Flights were either canceled or delayed. The culprit behind this? A malfunctioning system called NOTAM. (Don't mix it up with NORAD, whose primary mission is to track Santa Claus when he's delivering presents.) Each profession or industry has its acronyms to allow for clear, concise communication which to any outsider is totally incomprehensible. When computer geeks start talking about TCP/IP, CPU, DMA or IRQ, everyone else tunes out (and we don’t blame you). Aviation is no exception. Interestingly there may even be similarities between these two different industries. I'll get to that later. NOTAM, which stands for Notice to Airmen/Notice to Air Men/Notice to Air Missions provides notices and advisories for pilots to alert them of any hazards en route or at a specific location. It has its own very unique language to describe these situations, A small example: DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN CL AND BLUE EDGE LGT. CTN ADZ Translated to English for regular mortals is: DUE to Work in progress Taxiway B SOUTH Closed Between 'F' AND 'R'. Taxiway 'R' Closed Between 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN Centre line AND BLUE EDGE Light. Caution Advised NOTAM is not the only system used in aviation. Among several, you have AIRMET to describe weather phenomena along an air route. Then you have METAR, where you can get the latest weather report at the airport. As well, we have TAF, which gives you a weather forecast. If you are living close to any airport, the TAF is the most accurate and detailed weather information you can get and it is constantly updated. People's lives depend on the accuracy of these systems. This is why any changes take years or decades to implement. When reading news coverage of this huge travel disruption, you see words like 'legacy', 'obsolete' or 'old'. I can't comment on the current infrastructure supporting NOTAM. However, just because a system has been around for a long time shouldn't brand it as legacy or obsolete. Consider how long it has been in place and the number of outages (and headlines) associated with it. Overall, this is much smaller than outages of systems which would be considered 'modern', 'advanced' or 'the latest and greatest'. That leads me to the comparison with the computer industry. We got used to advancement in hardware, software, applications and connectivity. We expect a new version of anything, including right after we bought the current version of it. We admire any new disruption, because it will give us even more. It always gets better. But when something breaks or doesn't work based on our expectations, our emotions run high. We demand stability and working order. We are blissfully unaware of the systems which by all standards are old – or what these reporters might call legacy. That said, we need them to function for many, many years to come. An example? Government pension systems. If you live in a country where the government provides pension or insurance companies are paying out life insurance, you don't care if the system is using Java or PHP to program the computer (BTW: it is most likely COBOL). You just care that it will last at least until you collect your pension and your family collects the life insurance. This is my experience and lessons learned from years in IT consulting and working with computers. The more the system is critical for the business, the slower you move with any changes. Your decision-making is impacted less by the latest technology than by long term trends in both business and technology. Implementing a new feature or functionality can take years and you are always trying to minimize the risk. The recurrent pattern? Learn to understand the system's real business value and how to adjust the speed of innovation. That way, you’ll have a better idea of how to support business with technology.