Free Flight: impossible dream or future reality? | Aviation International News

Free Flight: impossible dream or future reality?

Free Flight describes a future air-traffic environment where we will fly unrestricted “trajectories” from departure to destination, based on our choice of

By Andrew Wood • Contributor

May 9, 2008

Free Flight describes a future air-traffic environment where we will fly unrestricted “trajectories” from departure to destination, based on our choice of route, altitude, speed, ETD and ETA, and with controllers sitting quietly at their screens while they monitor our progress to ensure we don’t get too close to each other.

Is this an impossible dream? Absolutely, many pilots flying in today’s system might justifiably answer. Yet we are slowly moving in that direction. In fact, as long ago as the mid-1980s some observers were already suggesting that aviation must move that way if we were to avoid the gridlock they felt would eventually overtake us.

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