Under pressure to address delays and relieve congested skies, the FAA is planning a redesign of the region’s airspace that would send hundreds of flights a day from John F. Kennedy International Airport over North and Central Jersey.

The changes are being made under the Federal Aviation Administration’s effort to improve efficiency and on-time performance at the region’s three major airports by replacing inefficient, 30-year-old routes, said Arlene Salac, an FAA spokeswoman.

The redesign, the culmination of a decade-long process that has included sometimes contentious public hearings and legal challenges from the New Jersey Coalition Against Aircraft Noise, could take place as early as this spring, the FAA recently told the federal Department of Transportation.

Robert Belzer, president of the coalition, said the added flights are just shifting the problem since North and Central Jersey are already clogged with flights in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport. With more planes over populated areas, noise levels and safety become concerns, he said.

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"Why do you want more airplanes flying over your head?" said Belzer. "Residential areas and airplanes don’t exactly mix."

The FAA is making the changes under its rule making authority and does not need further approvals, said Salac, the FAA spokeswoman.

"The reality in the New York Metropolitan area is that the airports are very close to each other and we have a lot of air traffic," Salac said. "And if you live in the Metropolitan area, you’re most likely going to face noise in some fashion."

An Oct. 28 report by the inspector general’s office of the federal transportation department found that persistent delays at Newark, JFK and LaGuardia have a ripple effect on on-time performance nationwide. The report urged the FAA to address the delays, which were blamed on the high volume of air traffic in the region — the nation’s busiest — and unrealistically high limits on the number of hourly landings and takeoffs.

The airline industry supports the redesign plan.

"We must continue along the path of airspace redesign, we must reduce congestion in New York air space, and we must get to the point where Newark, JFK can grow and not be constrained," said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, the industry’s main trade group. "The time has come for these projects to move forward and they are moving forward."

The air space redesign essentially creates more routes, allowing planes to fan out after takeoff, as opposed to stacking up behind one another.

Some less drastic route changes are scheduled for Newark Liberty but the FAA spokeswoman would give no detail. Belzer of the anti-noise group said the route changes would send jets roaring over residential neighborhoods of Newark and Elizabeth, instead of veering sharply east, toward Newark Bay, as they do now.

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The most dramatic changes would be in the routes taken by westbound departures from Kennedy, where jets will now fly over areas of Hudson, Bergen, Essex, Union, Morris, Middlesex, Somerset, Hunterdon and Warren counties. In the past, those jets flew south, over Monmouth, southern Middlesex, and Mercer counties, or north, skirting the northern reaches of Bergen, Passaic and Sussex Counties, near the New York State boarder.

Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie, declined to comment.

The FAA has posted the current and proposed arrival and departure routes, known as "gates," for JFK, Newark and LaGuardia on its website at www.faa.gov/air_traffic.

Salac could not immediately say just how many additional flights over Central and Northern North Jersey would result from JFK’s departure changes. About 575 flights per day depart from JFK, though many of those are European flights that would head east over the Atlantic, while still others would head north or south. But half of all JFK’s proposed redesigned departure routes — six of 12 — would fly over the state’s north-central core, while two additional routes would send jets over the shore counties clear down to Delaware Bay.

Salac said extensive environmental studies had been done to minimize the noise impact of the new routes. And Nancy Young, the Air Transport Association’s vice president for environmental affairs, noted that aircraft have become much quieter since the last time routes were changed.

"The real question is not just, is there a plane over them?" Young said. "But what is their noise exposure?"