United States Department of Transportation
i
Federal Aviation Administration wake turbulence program - recent highlights
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2012-10-01
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[PDF-530.03 KB]
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Abstract:Aircraft-generated wake turbulence has for years been a major factor in the air-traffic-control-imposed
separations between aircraft during departure, transit and arrival operations conducted at airports and air
corridors of high volume. Applied research at a global level aimed to mitigate the adverse effect of wake
turbulence traces back to the 1970s, although fundamental research related to the wake turbulence dates
back even further [1]. The volume of research and development (R&D) documented in the literature
since the 1970s has been impressive, but it is not until relatively recently that wake turbulence R&D has
directly contributed to both capacity and safety improvement in terms of tangible implementations of
operational changes. The contributors to the recent success (which is the subject of the current article) in
wake turbulence studies are many fold, and in depth account on those factors is beyond the scope of the
current paper, but interested readers are encouraged to contact the authors for further discussions. The
implications as well as real term impact of the recent and ongoing wake turbulence program development
are significant in supporting Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) overall goal to revitalize air
transportation system known as the Next Generation Air Transpiration System (NextGen). FAA
NextGen is designed to meet the expected growth of aviation in the United States, which requires a much
higher density of aircraft operating in the nation’s airspace. Many of the NextGen efforts revolve around
reducing the navigational uncertainty in the current system such that aircraft separation can be
substantially improved/reduced from a navigation perspective. Increasing navigation improvement, in a
system engineering sense, then increasingly shifts the attention to other aircraft separation factors such as
safe revision of the wake turbulence spacing as an enabler to these high-density operations. Therefore,
unless wake turbulence separation is appropriately addressed in the NextGen context, many of the
NextGen trajectory based concepts would not be able to realize their full potentials [2].
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