FAA Announces Effort to Enhance Safety, Increase Efficiency and Reduce Aircraft Emissions in Florida Airspace

The Florida Metroplex work teams will explore and develop proposed strategies to streamline airspace to help reduce airspace complexity for air traffic controllers and flight crews. The strategies include:

• Creating separate flight tracks for departures and arrivals to allow aircraft to climb and descend more efficiently.  
• Expanding the development of Optimized Profile Descent (OPD) procedures into the airports.  OPDs allow pilots to almost idle the engines while the aircraft descends, using the on-board Flight Management System to fly a continuous, descending path without leveling off.  OPDs reduce fuel consumption, carbon emissions and noise.
• Shortening flight tracks by making them more direct.
• Designing new satellite-based procedures for reliever airports.
• Developing routes that will enable general aviation traffic to fly more efficient routes through congested airspace.

NextGen is the transformation of the radar-based air traffic control system of today to a satellite-based system of the future. New procedures and technologies will significantly improve safety, capacity and efficiency and will reduce fuel burn, carbon emissions and environmental impacts.