FAA begins testing new notam system

NMS became operational on September 29 and is now being tested by “early adopter stakeholders,” including AOPA, agencies that issue notams, and vendors such as electronic flight bag providers. Pilots will be able to access the new system in the coming months, ahead of the full transition.

The upgrade follows years of calls to improve the reliability and clarity of notams. These calls gained new urgency after a nationwide outage in January 2023 that grounded flights across the country for more than eight hours. A few months later, AOPA supported the bipartisan NOTAM Improvement Act of 2023, which created the NOTAM Task Force. AOPA participated in that task force—established in early 2024—which produced dozens of recommendations addressing how notams are created, formatted, and distributed.

The FAA’s new NMS is a cloud-based, scalable platform designed to improve resilience, reduce system downtime, and make it easier for pilots to access more relevant information.

Some of the task force’s policy-focused recommendations—such as reevaluating what information should qualify as a notam and exploring alternatives to listing every unlit obstruction—will be implemented after NMS is fully operational.

The implementation of NMS also comes ahead of the FAA’s eventual transition to the International Civil Aviation Organization’s notam format, which is currently planned for late 2027 or early 2028.