Applying improved wind and aircraft performance data in wake procedure concepts

Abstract

As NextGen concepts seek increasing airport throughput, separation from naturally occurring wake turbulence becomes a limiting factor in the pursuit of capacity improvements in many cases. In recent years, the implementation of fixed procedural changes that reduce wake separations while maintaining safety have been very successful. Further opportunities for reducing wake constraints have led to exploiting specific meteorological conditions to mitigate wake hazards. As an example, one such program, entitled Wake Turbulence Mitigation for Departures, ensures safe reduction of successive departure separations based on dynamic crosswind conditions. Availability of these conditions, however, is limited by the abilities of the wind detection system -its sensing ability, data reliability and forecasting accuracy. Recent efforts are addressing these limitations by exploring how the use of better knowledge of wind and aircraft performance can increase availability or enable the design of further wake turbulence mitigation arrival and departure procedures. Additionally, recent advancements in aircraft flight track data assimilation have led to a deeper understanding of aircraft operational behavior during landing and take-off cycles. The confluence of these efforts is currently being leveraged to develop more sophisticated wake mitigation applications.This paper provides an overview of recent progress in developing broad data access and collection of weather and aircraft positional data; prospective applications that would leverage these data; and the relationship between the data density, or supply-side, requirements and the associated application demand needs.