Spine

Jeff Goodenough

About this app

Spine stands for "Soaring Pilot's Intelligent NOTAMs Editor". While, as its name suggests, Spine is mainly aimed at glider pilots, it can also be used by private GA pilots. Settings can be changed to filter NOTAMs for Gliding, GA VFR or GA IFR.

NOTAMs are "notices to airmen" published by the National Air Traffic Service and contain such things as warnings to pilots of short-term hazards which could affect air safety.

As downloaded from the internet, NOTAMs contain a lot of information that is not relevant, especially to glider pilots. Neither are they usually sorted into a convenient order.

Spine helps you to edit NOTAMs and discard the irrelevant ones, and also sorts the output into a usable form. You can also restrict the output to a specific area, for example by setting a maximum distance from your home airfield.

Currently, due to the availability of source information, the program can only be used in the United Kingdom.

Spine has been a popular product, available for the PC since 2004 and has now been ported to Android.