Jeppesen ForeFlight Simplifies Flight Planning With AI-Powered ClearNOTAMs

Jeppesen ForeFlight has introduced ClearNOTAMs, an AI-powered feature that decodes dense, heavily-abbreviated Notices to Air Missions (NOTAMs) into plain-English summaries that convey each notice’s real operational impact. The feature will be available following EAA AirVenture 2026, with all existing individual ForeFlight customers able to download a complimentary three-month trial after the show. After the trial period, ClearNOTAMs will be available exclusively with premium subscription plans. ClearNOTAMs doesn’t just translate acronyms — it lets pilots view the AI summary side by side with the original coded text for verification, and sort NOTAMs by relevance to their specific planned flight.

For pilots who have spent years squinting at all-caps NOTAM strings trying to figure out which notices actually matter for their flight, ClearNOTAMs targets one of aviation’s most persistent daily frustrations. Here’s what the feature does, how it works, and why it matters.

The Problem ClearNOTAMs Solves

Federal regulation 14 CFR 91.103 requires that pilots become familiar with “all available information concerning that flight” before departure. In practice, one of the hardest parts of meeting that requirement is sorting through NOTAMs — the notices that alert pilots to runway closures, taxiway construction, inoperative navigation aids, temporary flight restrictions, obstacle changes, and dozens of other operationally significant conditions.

The problem isn’t that NOTAMs lack information. It’s that they’re delivered in a format that actively works against comprehension:

All capital letters. NOTAMs are transmitted entirely in uppercase, which reduces readability and eliminates the visual cues that help the eye parse text.

Dense abbreviations and contractions. NOTAMs use a specialized shorthand — RWY for runway, TWY for taxiway, CLSD for closed, U/S for unserviceable, and hundreds more — that requires memorization or constant reference.

Coded formatting. Standard ICAO NOTAM format packs information into coded fields (Q-lines, coordinates, altitude bands) that are precise but far from intuitive.

Volume. A single cross-country flight can generate pages of NOTAMs, most of which are irrelevant to the specific flight. Finding the handful that matter — a closed runway at the destination, a TFR along the route — means reading through everything.

The result: pilots routinely spend significant time deciphering NOTAMs, and safety studies have repeatedly found that critical NOTAMs get missed simply because they’re buried in the noise. The FAA acknowledges the problem and has an ongoing NOTAM modernization program specifically to address the complaints.

What ClearNOTAMs Actually Does

ClearNOTAMs applies AI models specifically trained to interpret NOTAM jargon and extract the operational meaning. The workflow is straightforward:

Step 1: Feed in the raw NOTAM. The system takes the standard coded NOTAM as delivered.

Step 2: Generate a plain-English summary. The AI produces a clear, concise English summary of what the NOTAM actually means for a pilot’s operation — not just an expansion of the abbreviations, but an interpretation of the operational impact.

Step 3: Show it in context. The summaries are made available throughout the various ForeFlight functions, so when a pilot is on a page where a NOTAM is relevant, the plain-language version is right there.

Step 4: Enable verification. Critically, pilots can view the AI summary side by side with the original coded NOTAM to double-check the interpretation’s accuracy. This addresses the core concern about AI in safety-critical applications — the pilot retains the ability to verify the machine’s work against the authoritative source.

Beyond decoding, ClearNOTAMs also addresses the volume problem. Pilots can sort and prioritize NOTAMs by relevance to their specific trip and by various categories, filtering out the noise to surface the notices that genuinely matter for the planned flight.

What Jeppesen ForeFlight Said

Cole Crawford, Director of Product at Jeppesen ForeFlight, framed the feature in terms of the universal pilot experience.

“Every pilot across the globe has experienced the challenge of sorting through pages of NOTAMs before a flight,” Crawford said. “ClearNOTAMs helps pilots spend less time deciphering information and more time understanding it. By transforming complex NOTAM language into clear, concise summaries, we’re making one of the most important parts of flight planning more accessible and actionable.”

The distinction Crawford draws — between deciphering information and understanding it — captures the core value proposition. A pilot who can read a NOTAM but has to work hard to parse its meaning is spending cognitive energy on translation rather than decision-making. ClearNOTAMs aims to move that energy back toward the actual flight-planning judgment where it belongs.

The company also reported that pilots who used beta versions of the feature during testing said they felt more confident about reviewing NOTAMs prior to flying — which, for a task many pilots find tedious and error-prone, is a meaningful outcome.

Availability and Pricing

The rollout structure for ClearNOTAMs:

Availability: Following EAA AirVenture 2026 (which runs July 20-26, 2026). The timing aligns with Jeppesen ForeFlight’s broader presence at the world’s largest aviation gathering.

Free trial: All existing individual ForeFlight customers can download a complimentary three-month trial after the show. This gives the entire individual customer base a chance to evaluate the feature before committing.

Long-term access: After the trial period, ClearNOTAMs will be available exclusively with premium ForeFlight subscription plans.

The free-trial-then-premium model is a common approach for high-value software features, and it makes sense here: a three-month trial gives pilots enough time to experience ClearNOTAMs across a full season of flying — different destinations, different NOTAM types, different flight-planning scenarios — before deciding whether the premium subscription is worth it.

Where ClearNOTAMs Fits in Jeppesen ForeFlight’s AI Strategy

ClearNOTAMs is one piece of Jeppesen ForeFlight’s broader AI push, which the company unveiled in early July 2026 alongside its Airflow agentic AI engine. The full AI feature set announced includes ClearNOTAMs, an AI Connector that lets pilots query their ForeFlight data through OpenAI’s ChatGPT (with planned expansion to Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude), and Scheduler, a flight school scheduling platform.

ClearNOTAMs also builds on earlier NOTAM-focused work. In April 2026, Jeppesen ForeFlight introduced Graphical NOTAMs in FliteDeck Pro — a feature that translates dense NOTAM text into map-linked visual information for airline and business aviation pilots (for example, showing a closed taxiway directly on the airport diagram). ClearNOTAMs extends the AI-powered NOTAM improvement philosophy to the individual pilot’s flight-planning workflow.

The company’s NOTAM capabilities are underpinned by Jeppesen’s high-quality NOTAM data feed, which integrates the full set of domestic NOTAMs from many countries that other feeds often exclude. That data foundation matters: an AI summary is only as good as the source data it’s interpreting, and Jeppesen’s aeronautical data heritage — 90-plus years of gold-standard charting and navigation data — gives ClearNOTAMs a strong underlying source.

The Safety Question: Can Pilots Trust AI-Decoded NOTAMs?

The obvious concern with any AI-powered aviation tool is reliability. If an AI misinterprets a NOTAM — softening a critical runway closure or missing a temporary flight restriction — the consequences could be serious.

Jeppesen ForeFlight’s design addresses this concern directly through the side-by-side verification capability. The AI summary never replaces the original NOTAM; it sits alongside it. A pilot can read the plain-English interpretation to quickly grasp the meaning, then cross-check it against the authoritative coded text before making any flight-critical decision. The original NOTAM remains the legal and operational source of truth.

This design philosophy — AI as an assistive interpretation layer, not a replacement for the authoritative source — is consistent with the safety-first framing Jeppesen ForeFlight has emphasized across its entire AI strategy. The company has stated that its aviation AI is built to reason from certified inputs and to keep humans in control of decision-making. For a feature interpreting safety-critical NOTAMs, that human-in-the-loop verification is essential.

Pilots should approach ClearNOTAMs the way they’d approach any new tool: use it to work faster and understand better, but verify anything that affects a go/no-go decision against the original source. The feature is designed to support that workflow, not circumvent it.

Why This Matters for General Aviation

NOTAM comprehension is one of the few flight-planning tasks that affects virtually every pilot, on virtually every flight, regardless of experience level. A 20,000-hour ATP and a fresh Private Pilot both have to sort through the same dense NOTAM format. That universality is what makes ClearNOTAMs potentially impactful:

For student pilots, NOTAM interpretation is a genuine learning curve. ClearNOTAMs can help newer pilots understand what they’re reading while they build the experience to parse the raw format themselves.

For busy working pilots, the time savings compound. A CFI flying six lessons a day, a Part 135 pilot running multiple legs, or a business aviation crew planning international trips all benefit from faster, more reliable NOTAM review.

For safety broadly, anything that reduces the chance of a critical NOTAM being missed is valuable. The 2023 nationwide NOTAM system outage that ground-stopped U.S. aviation focused renewed attention on both the technical infrastructure and the user experience of NOTAMs. ClearNOTAMs addresses the user-experience side of that equation.

The feature won’t solve every NOTAM problem — the underlying system still generates too many notices in a format designed decades ago, and the FAA’s modernization program is the ultimate fix for that. But as an interpretation layer that makes the existing system more usable, ClearNOTAMs is a meaningful step.

What Pilots Should Do

For pilots interested in ClearNOTAMs:

If you use ForeFlight: Watch for the feature’s availability after AirVenture 2026. As an existing individual customer, you’ll be eligible for the free three-month trial — take advantage of it to evaluate the feature across a full season of flying before the premium subscription requirement kicks in.

During the trial: Use ClearNOTAMs alongside the raw NOTAMs, not instead of them. Get a feel for how accurately the AI summaries capture operational impact, and build confidence in the tool through the side-by-side verification view.

For go/no-go decisions: Always verify flight-critical NOTAMs (runway closures, TFRs, navaid outages) against the original coded source. Use the plain-language summary to work faster, but confirm anything that affects the safety of the flight.

If you’re a CFI: Consider how ClearNOTAMs fits into your instruction. It can be a useful teaching aid for helping students understand NOTAM content — but students should still learn to read raw NOTAMs, since not every cockpit or every situation will have ClearNOTAMs available.

The Bottom Line

ClearNOTAMs targets a problem every pilot recognizes: NOTAMs contain essential safety information delivered in a format that actively resists comprehension. By using AI to translate coded NOTAMs into plain-English summaries — while preserving the original text for verification and letting pilots sort by relevance — Jeppesen ForeFlight is applying artificial intelligence to one of flight planning’s most tedious and error-prone tasks.

The feature launches after EAA AirVenture 2026 with a free three-month trial for existing individual customers, then moves to premium subscription plans. For pilots who value time savings and clearer flight-planning information — and who use the tool responsibly, verifying critical notices against the source — ClearNOTAMs could meaningfully improve one of the least-loved parts of preflight preparation.

It’s not a replacement for the FAA’s broader NOTAM modernization work, and it doesn’t reduce the number of NOTAMs pilots receive. But as an interpretation layer that makes the existing system more usable and more actionable, ClearNOTAMs is one of the more practical applications of AI to reach the general aviation cockpit so far.


Frequently Asked Questions

What is ClearNOTAMs? ClearNOTAMs is an AI-powered feature from Jeppesen ForeFlight that decodes dense, heavily-abbreviated NOTAMs (Notices to Air Missions) into plain-English summaries conveying their real operational impact. It lets pilots view the AI summary side by side with the original coded NOTAM for verification and sort NOTAMs by relevance to a specific planned flight. The feature was announced in July 2026 as part of Jeppesen ForeFlight’s broader AI strategy.

When will ClearNOTAMs be available? ClearNOTAMs will be available following EAA AirVenture 2026 (which runs July 20-26, 2026). All existing individual ForeFlight customers can download a complimentary three-month trial after the show. After the trial period, ClearNOTAMs will be available exclusively with premium ForeFlight subscription plans.

How much does ClearNOTAMs cost? Existing individual ForeFlight customers receive a free three-month trial of ClearNOTAMs after EAA AirVenture 2026. Following the trial, ClearNOTAMs will be available exclusively with premium ForeFlight subscription plans. Jeppesen ForeFlight has not published a standalone price for the feature separate from the premium subscription.

Is it safe to rely on AI-decoded NOTAMs? ClearNOTAMs is designed as an assistive interpretation layer, not a replacement for the original NOTAM. Pilots can view the AI-generated plain-English summary side by side with the original coded text to verify accuracy. Best practice is to use the summary to understand NOTAMs faster, but to verify any flight-critical NOTAM (such as a runway closure or temporary flight restriction) against the original authoritative source before making go/no-go decisions.

How is ClearNOTAMs different from Graphical NOTAMs? Graphical NOTAMs, introduced in Jeppesen ForeFlight’s FliteDeck Pro in April 2026, translate NOTAM text into map-linked visual information (for example, highlighting a closed taxiway on an airport diagram) primarily for airline and business aviation pilots. ClearNOTAMs uses AI to generate plain-language text summaries of NOTAMs and is aimed at individual pilots in the ForeFlight flight-planning workflow. Both features address NOTAM comprehension, but through different approaches and for different user groups.

Sources:

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Aviation News, Articles & Resources | Skyfarer

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading