How the FAA Is Making East Coast Travel Faster and More Efficient This Summer

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved more than 100 new and more efficient flight routes along the East Coast in an effort to ease congestion and speed up summer travel.

The 169 new routes, which primarily operate along the East Coast and over the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, are more direct and therefore shorter in distance, according to the FAA. They are mostly flown above 18,000 feet in altitude.

"These significant improvements to our national airspace system are just in time for summer and will help travelers get to their destinations more efficiently," Tim Arel, the chief operating officer of the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization, said in a statement. "The new routes will reduce complexity and redistribute volume across all available airspace. I’m proud of the FAA and [the] industry’s strong collaboration on this project to get it done."

In total, the new routes — more than seven years in the making — will save airlines about 40,000 miles and 6,000 minutes of travel time annually. They will replace “legacy routes,” which tend to zig-zag more and were used when “aircraft largely relied on ground-based radar, limiting the directness of routes, instead of GPS,” according to the FAA.  

The decision to activate these routes comes weeks after the FAA allowed airlines to cut back on service from New York and Washington D.C.-area airports ahead of the busy summer season amid a staffing shortage. Carriers like United Airlines and American Airlines followed suit, temporarily cutting back on flights from the affected airports.

Beyond the East Coast, the summer is shaping up to be very busy for airports all over the world. Last month, Delta Air Lines reported its international flights were already 75 percent booked for the summer. And a new study noted international airfare is expected to reach a 5-year high this summer with the most expensive flights seen when flying to Europe and Asia.