What NOTAMs to Check Before a Flight

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Before every flight, check NOTAMs for your departure airport, destination, alternates, and the route between them. The minimum set: runway and taxiway closures, TFRs, navaid and approach outages, airspace changes, and obstacle NOTAMs — filtered to the window between your departure and arrival times. Most of what makes NOTAM briefings unreadable is items that won't be active while you're actually there.

Why NOTAMs are legally part of your preflight

14 CFR 91.103 requires the pilot in command to "become familiar with all available information concerning that flight" before beginning it. The rule names weather, fuel, alternatives, and runway lengths explicitly — but "all available information" is the operative phrase, and the FAA and NTSB have consistently read published NOTAMs into it. Land on a closed runway, taxi into a construction zone, or clip a stadium TFR, and the first question in the enforcement letter is whether the NOTAM was published. If it was, it was available, and 91.103 says you were required to be familiar with it.

That's the legal floor. The practical reason is simpler: NOTAMs are where the system tells you the chart is currently wrong.

NOTAM types, decoded

Flying to Canada? Canadian NOTAMs use the ICAO format — coded Q-lines, validity in a B)/C) group, distributed by NAV CANADA and organized by NOTAM file (often an FIR or region rather than the individual aerodrome). The content categories are the same; the packaging isn't. Pull them from NAV CANADA's flight planning site or your EFB, and don't assume a U.S.-style briefing captured them.

What order should you check NOTAMs in?

Don't read the raw list top to bottom — triage it. For a typical Part 91 GA flight:

1. TFRs first. They're the license-enders. Check the departure, route, and destination for TFRs active during your window — stadium (sporting events), VIP movement, firefighting, and space operations TFRs can pop up on hours of notice. This is the one category worth re-checking right before engine start on a long day.
2. Runway and airport status. Is your intended runway open, full length, with the displaced threshold where the chart says? Is the airport itself open? Is fuel available if your plan depends on it? A closed 5,000-foot runway at your destination turns a routine arrival into a short-field problem on the crosswind runway.
3. Approach and navaid outages — if IFR. An FDC NOTAM raising the ILS minimums, a GPS-outage NOTAM covering your RNAV approach, or a VOR shutdown that kills your filed alternate's only approach each quietly invalidates a plan that looked fine on the chart. Check every approach you might actually fly, including at the alternate.
4. Lighting and obstacles — if night or low visibility. Unlit towers along a night VFR route, PAPI out of service, pilot-controlled lighting inoperative at an unfamiliar field. In daylight VMC these are noise; at night they're the whole point.

Where do you actually get NOTAMs?

• FAA NOTAM Search (notams.aim.faa.gov) — the FAA's own search, by airport, by geography, or along a route. Good for verifying what another tool showed you.
• A Leidos briefing — 1800wxbrief.com or 1-800-WX-BRIEF. A standard briefing includes NOTAMs and creates a record that you obtained one, which matters if 91.103 ever comes up.
• Your EFB — ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, and similar apps pull NOTAMs into the airport pages and overlay TFRs on the map. Convenient, but know how your app handles categories and time filtering — some hide "expired-for-now" items in ways that surprise people.
• tfr.faa.gov — the FAA's graphical TFR list, worth a direct look on any day with wildfires, a stadium event, or presidential travel near your route.

The "no NOTAMs" trap

An empty NOTAM list is only good news if the source was actually asked. A clean-looking briefing can also mean the tool timed out reaching the NOTAM system, queried the wrong identifier, or dropped a category on the floor — and a silent failure renders exactly the same blank screen as genuine zero results. There is a real difference between "we queried the source and it returned nothing" and "we couldn't check." A trustworthy tool tells you which one happened; if yours doesn't, verify an empty list against a second source before believing it, especially at a towered field near a major city where "nothing published" would be unusual. (This distinction is built into FlightDecide: the app reports "queried, zero NOTAMs" and "coverage gap — couldn't check" as different states, and never shows a clean list it can't back up.)

A worked example

Say you're flying KHIO (Hillsboro) to KEUG (Eugene) tomorrow, wheels-up 1700Z, arriving about 1800Z. The check looks like:

• TFRs along the Willamette Valley corridor for 1600–1900Z — fire TFRs are the realistic threat in summer.
• KHIO and KEUG runway/taxiway status for the same window; note KEUG's runway 16R/34L is the long one your performance numbers assumed.
• If IFR: the RNAV and ILS approaches at KEUG plus your alternate (say KSLE) — any FDC amendments or GPS-outage NOTAMs touching them.
• Skip, consciously: the crane NOTAM active only weekdays 1500–0100Z if you'll be gone by then, and the unlit tower 30 miles east of your route. You looked, you filtered, you moved on — that's the system working.

NOTAMs are one input to the larger decision; the go/no-go decision framework shows where they slot in next to weather — starting with reading the TAF properly.

Related guides

Educational guide for flight-planning practice. It is advisory only and not a substitute for an official briefing or your own judgment as pilot in command (14 CFR 91.3). Sources: 14 CFR §91.103; AIM §5-1-3; FAA NOTAM Search (notams.aim.faa.gov); FAA TFR list (tfr.faa.gov). Last reviewed: July 17, 2026.