NASA Wake Vortex Research for Aircraft Spacing

Abstract

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is addressing airport capacity enhancements during instrument meteorological conditions through the Terminal Area Productivity (TAP) program. Within TAP, the Reduced Spacing Operations (RSO) subelement at the NASA Langley Research Center is developing an Aircraft Vortex Spacing System (AVOSS). AVOSS will integrate the output of several inter-related areas to produce weather dependent, dynamic wake vortex spacing criteria. These areas include current and predicted weather conditions, models of wake vortex transport and decay in these weather conditions, real-time feedback of wake vortex behavior from sensors, and operationally acceptable aircraft/wake interaction criteria. In today's ATC system, the AVOSS could inform ATC controllers when a fixed reduced separation becomes safe to apply to large and heavy aircraft categories. With appropriate integration into the Center/TRACON Automation System (CTAS), AVOSS dynamic spacing could be tailored to actual generator/follower aircraft pairs rather than a few broad aircraft categories.