A 1960s radio beacon in Alaska is gone, so two flight paths must change

The US Federal Aviation Administration is revoking one Alaskan air route and changing two others. This is because a specific radio beacon, used for navigation since the 1960s, has been decommissioned.

For decades, air travel relied on ground-based radio beacons to define flight paths. As these older systems are retired, the physical routes planes fly must be updated. This small change in Alaska is a tiny piece of a much larger, global shift towards satellite-based navigation.