What are the standard procedures/limitations to build a flight plan route with a mix of direct waypoints and airways ? (IFR flight planning only)
How to know if the direct waypoints are valid ? (dont consider CMFU validation or i have to? ,ex min FL-max FL to fly etc)

I see many flight plans (flight aware) are a mix of direct waypoints and airways.
From vatsim i came across with this :

In IFR flights there are few occasions when to fly direct instead of using airways. These situations can be: 1) when the distance is too short as to join an airway or 2) when the SID and STAR fix is the same or 3) when offered as a shortcut by ATC while enroute.
dont care about 3)

Should I  take into consideration the RAD restrictions(only common in europe?)
(i am not talking about FRA airspace)

 

Edited May 3, 20188 yr by OAL809

11 minutes ago, OAL809 said:

What are the standard procedures/limitations to build a flight plan route with a mix of direct waypoints and airways ?

Honestly, here in the States, there aren't really any restrictions unless you're flying between to heavily-trafficked airports (JFK-LAX for example). In the case of a popular route, have a look at the FlightAware filings to get an idea of what people are getting assigned. Over the years, airlines and ATC have come together to get an idea of what routes to file/fly, based on a number of things (time of day, aircraft type, weather, and so on). Today, for example, there's a huge line of storms running down the middle of the country, so all bets are off, route-wise (though there are several on the Playbook Routes - here's an example - which are pre-arranged routings that airlines and ATC collaborated on to alleviate delays for weather). Most days, though, they'll file a 'standard' route that they usually file.

One of my last flights, I ended up getting a direct routing to the DC area as far south as South Carolina, despite filing the whole route via airways. I know that's somewhat of a non-answer, but to be honest, a lot of the airways were designed back when we really needed to keep things stuck to ground-based navaids. With GPS and INS, we don't have the same restrictions. The result is a lot of this direct routing, or the use of NRS Routing:

NRS, based on a grid of short-form Lat/Lon points, allows a free form routing of flights. The blue lines in the above image show the ARTCC ("center") boundaries. As you can see with Denver (ZDV) and Kansas City (ZKC), the centers are designed to handle a lot of overflights (note the swooping east-west orientation that funnels toward ZLA). With this in mind, you'd want to choose routing that somewhat follows this, as skirting a boundary between centers is a surefire way to get your plan altered (hopping back and forth between centers because you're flying a boundary line would require a lot of coordination between the facilities, for example). Cutting across a bunch of busy jetways would also likely get you re-routed, or held at a non-optimal altitude.

It's all pretty complicated, so I usually just leave my flight planning up to the real world dispatchers by snagging the routes that were recently filed/flown on FlightAware. It's like having a dispatcher of your own for free...

49 minutes ago, scandinavian13 said:

Today, for example, there's a huge line of storms running down the middle of the country, so all bets are off, route-wise (though there are several on the Playbook Routes - here's an example - which are pre-arranged routings that airlines and ATC collaborated on to alleviate delays for weather). Most days, though, they'll file a 'standard' route that they u

Some really good information and advice here, Kyle, although I originally misread your Playbook Routes as Playboy Routes 😂

Direct routings under radar control are much more common than they used to be and, as you rightly say, all bets are off when your Spring thunderstorms and twisters are active in the Mid-West.  It is at times like this, when any sort of adverse weather affects flying, that I truly admire the professionalism of Air Traffic Controllers who somehow manage to cope with everything that is thrown at them, even if it means vectoring aircraft sometimes up to 100nms or so way off course just to get around the bad weather.

Bertie G   

First of all i forgot to say hello!
 

@Kyle

 

Almost always i like to surf the faa ois and aviation weather sites and see what happens with restrictions delays and weather/volume escape routes,advisories etc (as you had explained at the youtube video and thanks for that!) So in the US there aren't any serious restrictions except from some traffic management advisories that faa ois system has made public.Fro example volume,weather etc.I prefer the flightaware routes too but usually I build some routes before ending up with what i want.
I did not understand exactly the NRS routing.Where can i find this method online?

11 hours ago, OAL809 said:

What are the standard procedures/limitations to build a flight plan route with a mix of direct waypoints and airways ? (IFR flight planning only)
How to know if the direct waypoints are valid ? (dont consider CMFU validation or i have to? ,ex min FL-max FL to fly etc)

I see many flight plans (flight aware) are a mix of direct waypoints and airways.
From vatsim i came across with this :

In IFR flights there are few occasions when to fly direct instead of using airways. These situations can be: 1) when the distance is too short as to join an airway or 2) when the SID and STAR fix is the same or 3) when offered as a shortcut by ATC while enroute.
dont care about 3)

Should I  take into consideration the RAD restrictions(only common in europe?)
(i am not talking about FRA airspace)

 

To answer your question, it really depends on where you are flying and the filing restriction from the relevant ATC units.

Most Flexi routing crossing the Pacific are DIRECT Routing where oceanic waypoints are often 400miles apart. For these routing, the flight plan in general must contain a waypoint at each FIR. 

a typical routing before entering the first oceanic waypoint would be via normal airways in most of the FIRs. Except coming leaving departing out from SFO / LAX / JFK / ORD / YYZ where direct routing is almost always planned (I have never seen an exception so far,  except out of SFO / LAX sometimes you may be planned to follow the airways until abeam Portland before heading out to the pacific, but in practice, after airborne ATC will give you direct to the first oceanic waypoints as soon as possible. )

For Polar routes coming from the east coast of USA to Asia, direct routing is used until reaching the polar entry gateways i.e. ABERI, then the rest of the route will have to be flown over published airway within the entire Russian FIR, Mongolia and China with minimal direct possible.  

Like Kyle had mentioned previously, despite filing a flight plan using airways, it is very common to get 400-500nm direct by ATC these days. Especially when flying in US or over Europe. 

When flying to Europe (Going to AMS / LHR / CDG ), I always get a direct to a starting point of an arrival just after entered into Sweden airspace. Typical example is Direct to EEL and ARTIP or sometimes to GORLO if going to LHR. 

On 5/3/2018 at 11:49 PM, scandinavian13 said:

 

Many thanks Kyle for your post. Very interesting.

Here in old Europe, we can see more countries making free routings available (Italy above FL340) and some central european countries do not have high altitude airways anymore (Hungary, Austria etc...).

I found this amazing pdf about direct routes, en route operations etc :

https://skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/262.pdf