Alert Dear Garmin and ForeFlight - we need live NOTAM's on our aircraft displays and EFB's please

[Neal]

I have a Garmin G3X in my CubCrafters Carbon Cub FX-3, it's great, obviously it's outdated and I hear the G4X is coming "someday." And of course their are other avionics and also Garmin Pilot, and we can't leave out ForeFlight as tools we as pilots use. Inspired by the recent tragedy of a helicopter hitting a notam's sling line (or whatever it's called) we all know as pilots we can't visualize the data presented in notam's. While I may read about notam'd areas bounded by coordinates when doing my preflight prep in ForeFlight, it's useless to me. It is also impossible to keep up with notams along a flight path or change of flight path.

We need computers in this era (2026 as I write this) that keep us safe and can save lives. Just like terrain and obstacle avoidance systems, we need NOTAM data transmitted over ADS-B, Cellular, Starlink, or some form that gives real time information on our displays to help us be aware of life threatening obstacles.

Maybe something along this line already exists, but I'm not aware of it or reading about it in accident reports or social media discussions.

Please innovate our NOTAM system to integrate into your flight decks to keep us smart on anything we need to know for safety of flight.

Thank you.

 

[ve6yeq]

I am sure some TFRs and NOTAMs appear on the G3X Touch for me (I have SiriusXM Aviation [only TFRs?] and FIS-B [TFRs and some? NOTAMs] in the US). And more appear in text format when I look at the airport details screens (but I don't normally check these in flight).

However, just like the TFS and NOTAM layers in ForeFlight, it is clear that not all the NOTAMs are being displayed graphically, even though they are all there in the mostly unreadable text format. It does not seem like much work to add graphical support for the vast majority of NOTAMs in ForeFlight when there is internet connectivity.

The NOTAM problem is even worse in Canada as there is a 3 step process for map and obstacle updates: first in the NOTAMs until the next Canadian Flight Supplement (CFS) is published every 56 days where the updates stay hidden in the back of the book until the next time the VFR Navigation Charts (VNCs) and VFR Terminal Area Charts (VTAs) are published which happens randomly from 1 to 10 years. As no one ever reads the CFS from cover to cover and the charts are updated so slowly, it is as if updates never occur. I am sure that the FAA has a similar process for hiding map and obstacle updates.

So in the meantime, I check the ForeFlight map and load the latest databases available from Garmin into the G3X Touch and GNC 355...

 

[ve6yeq]

The latest Garmin G3X Touch Experimental Pilots Guide shows:

So they explicitly say that only TFRs are displayed graphically, and NOTAMs are hidden in text on the airport info screens...

 

[Waldom]

ForeFlight has had what you describe available for some time now.

On the map page, click on the symbol that looks like stacked papers on the top left of the page. The drop down menu gives you a choice of which charts you would like depicted on the left and what you would like depicted on them on the right. If you select both "NOTAMS" and "TFRs" in the righthand column, they will appear on the map. You can then touch them on the map and their details will pop up

Only the NOTAMS and TFRs that affect airspace are depicted if you have selected them on the "map" page. If you want NOTAMS specific to the airport such as runway closures and IAP procedures, you have to either touch the airport on the map of select that facility on the "Airports" page. Then you can touch 'NOTAMS' on the airport information shown.

With ADS-B in, that information is updated while in flight.