Recently, I’ve been doing research on (some) things aeronautical and learned about things like aerodome charts and ADS-B and the PPL (in Ireland) and so forth.
(Also, shout-out to OCW’s course on the PPL.)
One of the things that’s fairly important to flight operations is something called NOTAMs, which is an acronym for Notice to Airmen (you can blame the FAA for sticking to bad naming).
NOTAMs are, essentially, manifests of warnings for a given airport or aerodome. As such, they are – generally – available for free from the FAA or DoD; albeit, their format does lend much to be desired for automating receiving or processing them.
Think of NOTAMs like any other public safety information, like weather warnings from your (national) weather service or brown-out notifications from your electricity provider or boil advisories from your water providers or hazard warnings for traffic/road works, and it’s pretty much the same thing – only for the air.
Of note for this particular blog, is that the ICAO appears to want a considerable fee for querying for more than 100 NOTAMs (100 total API calls, really) during the lifetime of an API key that you obtain from them. The fees aren’t exactly cheap.
Of course, you can obtain this information from some third-party websites but they want you to agree to some ToS’s (Terms of Services) or sign-up for an account – which means potentially that they sell your information on the side (or through the transitive properties of algebra, via Google Tags or the like).
Ok… So… If the FAA and DoD give this information – for free – why should it come down to recouping the cost from everyone for ICAO to give this information to the average user? …or why should we trade information on ourselves (or our browsing habits) for it?
Better still, is there a way to derive this information (on request) and leave paying (or involving) a third-party out of the equation? If we have some patience – and use .NET – there is.
I’ve written a class in my Felsökning.UnitedStates package (not available until 8.0.4), which will do just this. It will take a given ICAO code you provide for an airport or aerodome and will query the FAA NOTAMs endpoint for the current NOTAMs published (all of them for a given airport – 35, currently, for Dublin for example). It will then parse the HTML body, to reach the NOTAMs table, strip the remaining HTML, and then present each NOTAM as a string into a collection of strings.
Below is a demonstration from testing the package of one of the current NOTAMs for Dublin Airport (ICAO Code: EIDW).
To leverage this code, all you need to do is import the NuGet package into your .NET project – or copy the code directly from the source (modifying it to fit your needs, of course).
Better still: It’s all free. 🙂