FAA completes first phase of NOTAM overhaul more than a year ahead of schedule

The Federal Aviation Administration has shut down the legacy US NOTAM System (USNS), completing the first phase of a long-promised overhaul of the pilot alert system that has dogged successive administrations following its dramatic collapse in January 2023.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced on Monday that the FAA had migrated thousands of users to the new cloud-based NOTAM Management Service (NMS) in mid-April, retiring the four-decade-old infrastructure that grounded more than 11,000 flights three years ago when contractors accidentally deleted a key file. The Department of Transportation had originally targeted late 2027 for completion of phase one.

"Our transition to this state-of-the-art NOTAM system strengthens safety and reliability across the National Airspace System," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement, framing the upgrade as central to the agency's broader push to modernise an air traffic control infrastructure that has come under sustained pressure from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.

NOTAMs, the safety-critical advisories notifying pilots and flight planners of runway closures, airspace restrictions and other temporary changes, are issued more than four million times a year. The legacy USNS, in service since 1985, had suffered repeated outages in recent years and was identified by lawmakers as one of the most fragile pieces of federal aviation infrastructure.

The next phase, which will retire the Federal NOTAM Service (FNS) and leave the new NMS as the single authoritative source for all NOTAMs, is now scheduled for later in 2026. Duffy's department has positioned the accelerated timeline as evidence of its broader reform agenda for the FAA, which faces continued scrutiny over air traffic controller staffing and the rollout of new safety systems following last year's Flight 5342 collision.