CENTRAL EAST PACIFIC FLIGHT ROUTING


Shon Grabbe, Banavar Sridhar, and Nadia Cheng


This paper examines the potential benefits of transitioning from the 
fixed Central East Pacific routes to user-preferred routes.  A 
minimum-travel-time, wind-optimal dynamic programming algorithm was 
developed and utilized as a surrogate for the actual user-provided 
routing requests. After first describing the characteristics of the 
flights utilizing the Central East Pacific routes for a five-day 
period, the results of both nominal and wind-optimal routing 
simulations are presented.  The average potential time and distance 
savings for the wind-optimal routes was 9.9 min and 36 nmi per 
flight, respectively.  When the wind-optimal routing flight plan 
deviations were confined within the oceanic center boundary, the 
average potential time and distance savings were 4.8 min and 4.0 nmi 
per flight, respectively.  These results are likely an upper bound on 
the potential savings due to the location of the polar jet stream 
during this five-day period.  Although the sector loading did not 
significantly change under the wind-optimal routing simulations, the 
number of simulated first-loss-of-separation events did, which could 
contribute to increased controller workload.