On Nov. 27, The Boeing Company was awarded a patent on a method for modifying a flight path to be flown by the aircraft “that causes the aircraft to remain within containment boundaries of a Required Navigation Performance (RNP) instrument flight procedure while reducing noise impact to the communities underneath the flight path and meeting the spacing requirements of the air traffic controller.” Boeing declined to discuss the patent with ANR but it appears to provide the variation in precise, narrow NextGen flight paths that communities have been demanding.
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