United States East Coast Flight Planning 

Welcome back to Jump Seat. Today we will discuss flight planning in one of the busiest flight corridors in the world, the United States east coast, and how you can reduce the chances of having your route amended by controllers.  

Out with the Old, In with the New 

In Spring of 2023, the FAA completed a milestone event by replacing numerous J-Routes with high level Q-routes, as a part of the National Airspace Modernization effort. These new Q-routes take advantage of GPS instead of ground-based systems that J-routes were reliant on. The new airways have been a long-planned initiative as part of a multi-step process to add, remove, and replace airways during recent Aeronautical Information Regulation and Control (AIRAC) or charting cycles. During this transition periods you may have also noticed that low level V-routes are being replaced with T-Routes, which are the low-level equivalent of Q-routes.  

Industry Collaboration or ARINC + FAA = BFFs 

Recently the ARINCDirect Flight Coordination (FC) team was invited to the FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) and the Potomac Consolidated TRACON (PCT) in Warrenton, VA. The FC team had the opportunity to observe PCT controllers and learn more about traffic flows into the Washington D.C. metro airports. As part of the visit, the team was invited onto the floor of the FAA Command Center Control and given the opportunity to take a deeper dive into the implementation of national air traffic control flow programs. FCs also had time to ask questions of the controllers making these decisions daily.      

Following the onsite visit to the FAA’s ATCSCC, the FC leadership team and flight planning subject matter experts met with an FAA Airspace & Procedures representative. This person specializes in airspace and procedures and played a significant role in east coast airspace redesign. The team spoke at length about how ARINCDirect and their users can help the National Airspace System (NAS) operate more efficiently and reduce both controller and pilot workload.  

The key takeaways were: 

• Random or optimized routing should not be used in the northeast to Florida corridor. Preferred routes should be filed at all times, or if not published, then you should file published routes for other city pairs as closely as possible.  
• If you are anticipating a weather event, preferred routes or playbook routes should still be followed.  
• Flight planners should know that ATC Cleared Routes don’t necessarily equate to “good” routes. 

Preferred Routing are PREFERRED

Flight planning in the United States can be relatively easy compared to the complexities of oceanic and international travel. The FAA’s En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system will typically allow you to file any route, provided the airways and waypoints are valid. The ERAM system will process the flight plan and amend the route, if necessary, so that eventually the cleared route can be delivered to the crew. This differs from locations such as Eurocontrol where routes must pass validation before they are acknowledged and filed. 

Throughout a large portion of the United States, namely less trafficked areas, optimized or random routing is possible to take advantage of favorable winds aloft or better weather conditions. The east coast corridor, however, is an exception to this rule. The FAA advised that the best practice for flight planning between airports in the northeast United States and Florida is to first and foremost, use preferred routes.  

The FAA publishes preferred routes on their website and also works closely with service providers to communicate large scale airspace redesigns, such as we have seen in Florida as recently as last year. Finding a route is a simple as inputting a 3 letter IATA code if the airport is in the United States or there are stored routes for international locations such as Toronto (CYYZ) and Nassau (MYNN) using 4 letter ICAO identifiers.  

If a published route is available, ARINCDirect will display those as ATC Preferred along with additional information such as if the route is high level (H) or low level (L) or if the route is for Turboprops. Below you can see the routes presented on the flight planning page and how the FAA’s site displays them: 

So, what happens if a preferred route is not published? For example, a search for Fort Lauderdale Executive (KFXE) to Teterboro (KTEB) does not return any results. The FAA advised that the next best step would be to find a nearby airport with a published preferred route, in this case Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International (KFLL), and follow that route as closely as possible. Searching the route database for KFLL to KTEB returns several options: 

Fortunately, the FEALX2 Standard Instrument Departure (SID) services KFXE and the route #1 FEALX2 ETECK DCT GRUBR Y299 SEELO DCT GARIC DCT ZORDO Q111 SWNGR JAIKE4 can be used if you were looking to file an offshore route.  

When ATC Cleared ≠ ATC Cleared 

When flight planning on the ARINCDirect site you may be faced with several options including, Auto-Generated Route, ATC Preferred, ATC Cleared and Previously Filed. The FAA made it a point to stress that operators should use caution when using ATC Cleared routes. The fact they are labeled as such does not necessarily mean they are “good” routes. These routes are obtained via ARINCDirect’s access to the FAA’s System Wide Information Management (SWIM) feed. Other industry providers utilize the same feed and present ATC Cleared routes in a similar manner. There’s a chance that the ATC Cleared route you are using was submitted by a flight planner on another flight planning site that may not have had access to the tools and expert-level customer support provided the ARINCDirect Flight Operations teams. It’s also important to note that there’s a chance the route was chosen because a restricted area was not active or due to a special event. The best guidance is to do your homework when using ATC Cleared routes to ensure they do not enter restricted airspace and follow preferred route guidance.          

Help Me, Help You 

What can you do to help make the National Airspace System (NAS) operate more efficient and safely? User feedback is critical to improving the flight planning experience on the ARINCDirect platform. Each business day representatives from across the ARINCDirect team and subject matter experts convene to discuss customer feedback ranging from issues with datalink to feedback about a route.  



We rely on our user’s knowledge of local airspace procedures in addition to our industry partnerships to regularly improve our route generation. The ARINCDirect Flight Planning and Navigation (FPLNAV) team is staffed by a talented group of subject matter experts who can assist with questions about aircraft performance or adjust auto-generated routes to account for non-published preferred routing procedures. Our mission is to provide a positive user experience across our website and applications to help simplify the business of flight.  

• AIRAC cycles last 28 days. You can find upcoming dates on this Eurocontrol site.
• Storing a Customer Route in your account? Think about leaving off the SID and STARs to avoid obsolete routes. ARINCDirect’s flight planning engine will apply the correct SID or STAR if you list the transition point(s) in your saved route string. Leaving a SID/STAR on the route could cause the flight plan to fail when the procedure graduates, or goes up one number. 

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