Analysis of performance of Q routes for establishing future design criteria

Q routes are en route airway routes, between FL180 and FL450, which can be flown by RNAV equipped aircraft capable of conforming to navigation specified by RNAV 2. Q routes, in use since late 2003, provide more direct routing compared to conventional routes, and are intended to reduce flight distance and travel time. This paper analyzes the benefits of Q routes by comparing the flight performances along select origin destination (OD) pairs, for first quarter of 2003 and first quarter of 2009. The flight performance is measured by: Distance Flown and Travel Time. The two metrics are computed using flight position updates, for the flight en route phase and for the entire flight leg. The results indicate that the flight en route performance was statistically improved on Q routes than conventional airway routes in terms of mean Distance Flown (e.g. +4% for Q Route 1) and mean Travel Time (e.g. +5% for Q Route 1). The flight leg performance was statistically improved on Q routes than conventional airway routes in terms of mean in Distance Flown (e.g. +1.2 % for Q Route 3) and mean Travel Time (e.g. +2% for Q Route 3). These results provide useful criteria for future airspace design.