I was perusing the internet today and came across the FAA's disaster routing playbook. The playbook specifies the routes that a pilot should fly, and along which ATCs should route, in the event that the original destination is unreachable.
Consider the following route to SFO (San Francisco International Airport) [1]:
ORIGIN |
FILTERS |
ROUTE |
DEST |
REMARKS |
CZW CZY ZMP |
|
ABR WETVI UROCO MLD J32 LLC LEGGS BDEGA3 |
SFO |
The first column tells us the relevant Area Control Center jurisdictions from which air traffic must be diverted. ZMP, for example, denotes the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center which handles about 30,000 square miles of the Midwest.
The second column indicates which points of interest (waypoints, weather stations, airports, etc.) should be ignored if they happen to fall within or near the specified route. In this particular example, no filters are given.
The third column specifies the relevant RNAV routes from the origin to the destination. The particular notation that the FAA uses is set forth in Part 4, Chapter 20, Section 5 of the FAA's Procedures for Handling Airspace Matters.
Reading from left to right, we can see that this route indicates that pilots near or at the city of Aberdeen, South Dakota (abbr. ABR), in the top right of the diagram below, should:
- Go to aviation waypoint WETVI
- Proceed to waypoint UROCO
- Proceed to Malad City, Idaho (abbr. MLD)
- Continue along Jet Route 32 (abbr. J32)
- Proceed to Lovelock, Nevada (abbr. LLC)
- Proceed to SFO
- Approach SFO along Arrival Route LEGGS
- Transition into final approach route BDEGA3
The fourth column is the destination.
The diagram below shows routes leading to SFO including the one just discussed.
