It’s the holiday season — which means many are taking to the skies to join their loved ones.

If you’ve ever used an app to navigate on a road trip, you’ve probably noticed how it finds you the most efficient route to your destination, even before you depart. To that end, NASA has been working to make flight departures out of major international airports more efficient — thereby saving fuel and reducing delays — in close collaboration with the aviation industry and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

The savings are possible thanks to a NASA-developed tool called Collaborative Digital Departure Rerouting. 

This tool determines where potential time savings could be gained by slightly altering a departure route, based on existing data about delays. The software presents its proposed more-efficient route in real time to an airline, who can then decide whether or not to use it and coordinate with air traffic control through a streamlined digital process. 

The capability is being tested thoroughly at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and Love Field Airport in Texas in collaboration with several major air carriers, including American Airlines, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United. 

Now, these capabilities are expanding out of the Dallas area to other major airports in Houston for further research. 

“We’re enabling the use of digital services to greatly improve aviation efficiency,” said Shivanjli Sharma, manager of NASA’s Air Traffic Management — eXploration project which oversees the research on aviation services. “Streamlining airline operations, reducing emissions, and saving time are all part of making an efficient next-generation airspace system.” 

The animation above shows the savings Collaborative Digital Departure Rerouting is responsible for at just a single airport. As the tool is expanded to be used at other airports, the savings begin to add up even more. 

It’s all part of NASA’s vision for transforming the skies above our communities to be more sustainable, efficient, safer, and quieter. 

Collaborative Digital Departure Rerouting is one of a series of new cloud-based digital air traffic management tools NASA and industry plan to develop and demonstrate as part of the agency’s Sustainable Flight National Partnership. These new flight management capabilities will contribute to the partnership’s goal of accelerating progress towards aviation achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.