Narrative:

Shortly after opening the facility this morning; I received a call from the aocc maintenance coordination folks seeking approval for a planned shutdown of the mgm VORTAC. I approved it and a few minutes later reviewed NOTAMS for the area and saw mgm which indicated that the VORTAC would be out of service. 38 minutes after the outage commenced; the facility secretary brought me a fax containing 2 fdc NOTAMS (fdc 8/4421 and 8/4422) issuing restrictions on approaches for both mgm and sem airports due to the VORTAC outage. If the outage merited an fdc NOTAM for safety; then it should have been issued well before the outage. I don't actually know what time it was issued; but it was not received here in the facility responsible for issuing approach clearances until 38 minutes after the outage commenced. I recently attended a class in which it was repeatedly stressed that ATC should issue clearances and information 'in time for it to be useful to the pilot.' at the same time; at the national level; they are not doing the same thing. NOTAMS are only useful to pilots if the pilot receives them. The equipment outage NOTAM and procedural fdc NOTAM should be issued well in advance of a scheduled equipment outage.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: MGM controller voiced concern regarding the timely distribution of NOTAMS containing NAVAID outages.

Narrative: Shortly after opening the facility this morning; I received a call from the AOCC Maintenance Coordination folks seeking approval for a planned shutdown of the MGM VORTAC. I approved it and a few minutes later reviewed NOTAMS for the area and saw MGM which indicated that the VORTAC would be out of service. 38 minutes after the outage commenced; the facility secretary brought me a fax containing 2 FDC NOTAMS (FDC 8/4421 and 8/4422) issuing restrictions on approaches for both MGM and SEM airports due to the VORTAC outage. If the outage merited an FDC NOTAM for safety; then it should have been issued well before the outage. I don't actually know what time it was issued; but it was not received here in the facility responsible for issuing approach clearances until 38 minutes after the outage commenced. I recently attended a class in which it was repeatedly stressed that ATC should issue clearances and information 'in time for it to be useful to the pilot.' At the same time; at the national level; they are not doing the same thing. NOTAMS are only useful to pilots if the pilot receives them. The equipment outage NOTAM and procedural FDC NOTAM should be issued well in advance of a scheduled equipment outage.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of May 2009 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.