NBAA News Hour: What NOTAM Modernization Means to You

Jan. 27, 2026

The FAA is revamping NOTAMs and making them more accessible and easier to understand, with the NOTAM Modernization Service (NMS) slated to replace the US NOTAM System and Federal NOTAM System by late spring 2026.

During a Jan. 27 NBAA News Hour webinar, association and agency experts discussed what operators can expect.

“NBAA views the NOTAM initiative as more than just an update to a critical information system,” said panel moderator Heidi Williams, NBAA vice president of air traffic services and infrastructure. “The U.S. has undertaken the work to build a brand-new ATC system. That work will require new types of collaboration between government and industry.”

Soliciting user feedback was key to the challenge-based acquisition process for NMS, which targeted performance-based solutions to specific issues over a broader technical overhaul. The result was a much faster development process following the program launch in Q1 2025.

“NMS will become the single authoritative source for all NOTAMs,” said Tom Draffen, group manager for Aviation Weather & Aeronautical Services at the FAA. “The service is designed to ensure high availability, to be fault tolerant [and to] have built-in disaster recovery capabilities.”

Allen Mackey, FAA program manager for NOTAM Modernization, said the January 2023 system outage that grounded morning departures for 90 minutes across the National Airspace System made clear the need for a more robust solution.

“The first thing we had to do was obviously to stabilize the existing system,” he said. “While doing that, we also recognized [the need to] find a different way to procure a new capability to resolve the aging issue with the current system.”

While the new NMS infrastructure is significantly improved, end users may not notice many differences at first. Domestic NOTAMs will continue to follow the existing format, with international NOTAMs adhering to ICAO standards.

Mackey emphasized that’s due to current policies, not technology. “The [NMS] is designed so that, in terms of future policy changes to ICAO, we’ll be able to fairly easily [improve the format],” he added. “But that full process has to go forward first.”

Until those changes occur, Draffen noted NMS is designed to better enable prioritization of NOTAMs most likely to significantly impact operations with third-party electronic flight bag providers like ForeFlight and Garmin. “We’re laying the groundwork for that infrastructure,” he added. “Plug in with our team, and we can certainly provide SMEs and help you think through how to prioritize on behalf of your customers.”

Williams reiterated NMS offers an encouraging glimpse at the FAA’s larger modernization efforts.

“The NOTAM upgrade gives us every reason to believe that when government and industry come together in a shared purpose, around an identified priority, big and important things can happen,” she concluded. “Those outcomes point to nothing less than America’s continued global leadership in aviation and aerospace, at every level.”