NTL Record

Title Federal Aviation Administration wake turbulence program - recent highlights
Record ID 45912
Personal Name
Creator
Tittsworth, Jeffrey; Lang, Steven; Johnson, Edward J.; Barnes, Stephen
Source 57th Air Traffic Control Association (ATCA) Annual Conference & Exposition, Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, MD, October 1-3, 2012
Corporate Creator Federal Aviation Administration; John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (U.S.); United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Publisher National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Publication Date 20121001
Language English
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].
Rosap ID dot:9642
Rosap URL https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/9642
TRT Terms Wakes; Flow; Boundary layer separation; Aircraft; Airspace; Advanced automation systems; Air traffic flow management; Turbulence; Aircraft separation; Approach control
General Subjects Wake turbulence
Classification NTL - AVIATION - AVIATION;
NTL - AVIATION - Air Traffic Control
Geographical
Coverage
United States
TRIS Online
Accession No
1449513
Availability Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, Technical Reference Center
Resource type Proceedings
URL https://ntlrepository.blob.core.windows.net/lib/45000/45900/45912/Lang__Wake_Turbulence_Program.pdf
Format PDF
Database NTL Digital Repository