To mitigate the risk of wake vortex encounters during final approach, so-called plate lines have been developed. Wake vortices generated by landing aircraft induce secondary vortices at the plates' surfaces that approach the primary vortices and trigger premature wake vortex decay. Each plate line consists of several upright plates being installed underneath the approach slope. While the plate line extends perpendicular to the flight direction, its individual plates are oriented in parallel to the runway centerline. To obtain the approval of the authorities for the installation of the plate lines at runway 16 of Vienna International Airport, the plate design had to comply with airport requirements like obstacle clearance, stability, and frangibility. During a six-month campaign, wake vortex behavior of about 9500 landings with and without plates was measured simultaneously by three lidars complemented by a comprehensive suite of meteorological instrumentation. The analysis of over 1000 measured wake vortex evolutions indicates that the plate lines reduce the lifetimes of the vortices in a safety corridor along the final approach by 22-37% depending on the aircraft type. This corresponds to a reduction of vortex circulation by about 50% for the most relevant International Civil Aviation Organization separation (Medium behind Heavy).
To mitigate the risk of wake vortex encounters during final approach, so-called plate lines have been developed. Wake vortices generated by landing aircraft induce secondary vortices at the plates' surfaces that approach the primary vortices and trigger premature wake vortex decay. Each plate line consists of several upright plates that are installed underneath the approach glide path. While the plate line extends perpendicular to the flight direction, its individual plates are oriented in parallel to the runway centerline. In order to obtain the approval of the authorities for the installation of the plate lines at runway 16 of Vienna International Airport, the plate design had to comply with airport requirements like obstacle clearance, stability, and frangibility. During a six-month campaign wake vortex behavior of about 9,500 landings with and without plates was measured simultaneously by three lidars complemented by a comprehensive suite of meteorological instrumentation. The analysis of over 1000 measured wake vortex evolutions indicates that the plate lines reduce the lifetime of long-lived vortices in a safety corridor along the final approach by 21% to 35% depending on the aircraft type. This corresponds to a reduction of vortex circulation by about 50% for the most relevant ICAO separation (Medium behind Heavy).
The position and strength of wake vortices captured by LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) instruments are usually determined by conventional approaches such as the Radial Velocity (RV) method. Promising wake vortex detection results of LiDAR measurements using machine learning and operational drawbacks of the comparatively slow traditional processing methods motivate exploring the suitability of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for quantitatively estimating the position and strength of aircraft wake vortices. The ANNs are trained by a unique data set of wake vortices generated by aircraft during final approach, which are labeled using the RV method. First comparisons reveal the potential of custom Convolutional Neural Networks in comparison to readily available resources as well as traditional LiDAR processing algorithms.
Wake vortex related minimum aircraft separations for arrivals were evaluated utilizing plate lines. A plate line consists of a series of vertical plates placed in front of the runway that accelerate the decay of wake vortices. This study evaluates the potential to reduce minimum aircraft separations and the potential to increase safety due to the accelerated vortex decay. The presented method follows the methodology of the proposal for revised wake turbulence categorization RECAT-EU as much as possible in order to be compliant with the respective certified safety assessment. Wake vortex data measured by lidar with and without plates during a measurement campaign at Vienna International Airport, Austria, were used to generate generic non-dimensional decay curves for all captured aircraft types under so-called reasonable worst-case weather conditions with and without plates. The observed wake vortex behavior without plates was fitted to the generic decay curve from RECAT-EU. The application of the same method to the measurements with plates yields a generic decay curve representing the accelerated decay triggered by the plates. Applied to the RECAT-EU minimum separation scheme potential separation reductions ranging from 12% to 15% were evaluated. The same method was applied to the RECAT-EU-PWS pairwise separations, yielding a potential separation reduction due to the plates of 12% to 24% (average 14.8%) or a potential circulation reduction of about 20% to 30%. An assessment of the associated encounter risk showed significant benefits from plate lines indicating that the collaborative introduction of RECAT-EU-PWS together with plate lines may bring about increased airport capacity and safety at the same time when comparing it to the RECAT-EU scheme which is already operational at four European airports. Nomenclature1, 2 = decay coefficients (-) = vortex circulation (m²/s) = initial vortex circulation (m²/s) = normalized vortex circulation (-) = wing aspect ratio (-) = air density (kg/m³) b = wing span (m) b0 = initial vortex spacing (m) g = gravitational acceleration (m/s²) = altitude (m)
To mitigate the risk of wake vortex encounters during final approach, so-called plate lines have been developed. Wake vortices generated by landing aircraft induce secondary vortices at the plates' surfaces that approach the primary vortices and trigger premature wake vortex decay. Each plate line consists of several upright plates that are installed underneath the approach glide path. While the plate line extends perpendicular to the flight direction, its individual plates are oriented in parallel to the runway centerline. In order to obtain the approval of the authorities for the installation of the plate lines at runway 16 of Vienna International Airport, the plate design had to comply with airport requirements like obstacle clearance, stability, and frangibility. During a six-month campaign wake vortex behavior with and without plates was measured simultaneously by three lidars completed by a comprehensive suite of meteorological instrumentation. A preliminary analysis of 430 measured wake vortex evolutions indicates that the plate lines reduce the lifetime of longlived vortices in a safety corridor along the final approach on average by more than 30%. More comprehensive analyses are underway and will be presented at the AVIATION Forum 2020 in Reno.
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