FAA Proposes New High-Altitude Jet Routes

Jan 25, 2017William Garvey, Jessica A. Salerno and Molly McMillin | Business & Commercial Aviation

The FAA is proposing a dozen new high-altitude jet routes along the U.S. East Coast as part of a modernization strategy to replace legacy ground-referenced routes with GPS-supported, performance-based navigation (PBN) routes. Called the Atlantic Coast Route Project (ACRP), the effort is the first phase of agency’s plan to deploy new and more efficient PBN routes across the U.S. in five stages, starting with the East Coast. The so-called “Q-Routes,” which typically require Required Navigation Performance (RNP) 2, are more precise than the legacy high-altitude jet routes (J-Routes) that are based on the FAA’s network of VOR ground stations. An aircraft with RNP 2 capability can maintain its position to 4 nm on either side of a route. The proposed new Q-Routes are primarily north-south, extending from New England to Southern Florida and linking to the Caribbean. “The Eastern Seaboard is an area containing heavily traveled and constricted airspace,” the FAA said in the proposed rules. Over time, the FAA plans to reduce the number of VORs and correspondingly phase out the high-altitude airways linked to those stations in lieu of PBN routes. Benefits of the Q-Routes, of which more than 100 already exist in the U.S., include the ability to have parallel routes separated by only 8 nm; higher throughput per air traffic control sector; and with fewer waypoints along a route a corresponding reduction in the number of “choke points” in the National Airspace System. The new routes in the proposed rule are part of ACRP Phase 1, which focuses on the northeastern U.S. and airspace that is controlled by the Air Route Traffic Control Centers in Boston and New York. In Phase 2, the FAA will deploy new routes south of the New York ARTCC’s airspace to the Caribbean area through separate rulemaking.