FAA introduces efficient flight routes for smoother summer travel.

The FAA has opened almost 170 new air traffic routes along the East Coast while retiring older aerial tracks that were less efficient and harder to manage. The new routing options are more direct than the existing paths that aircraft typically use, and are expected to save 40,000 travel miles and approximately 6,000 minutes in the air for planes traversing the Eastern seaboard every year. The new routes use updated GPS technology instead of ground-based radar, which allows for more straight-line flying and gives air traffic controllers more flexibility to reroute planes in the event of bad weather.