Honeywell has received a US patent for a system it claims to be the first to visually show pilots whether their aircraft will come into contact with dangerous wake turbulence from other aircraft.
Uncloaking the potential for wake turbulence issues between aircraft is a key element of the US Federal Aviation Administration's desire to boost terminal area capacity near airports. It hopes to achieve this by reducing in-trail and lateral distances between landing aircraft on new runways possibly built between existing parallel runways.
The issue has been identified by the National Academy of Sciences as an obstacle to increased capacity promised by the FAA's next-generation air transport plan (NextGen). "Unless the separation distances can be reduced, other NextGen technologies will have much less impact on arrival and departure capacity than they otherwise could be expected to have," experts say.
Capacity aside, Honeywell sees the lack of visibility into wake as a safety issue. "This lack of information represents a significant aviation hazard that could result in injuries to passengers and crew, or potentially, damage and loss of the airplane," it says. According to Honeywell, aircraft experiencing uncommanded roll and pitch manoeuvres have to occasionally be removed from service for up to two days to inspect for potential control system or other mechanical flaws that may actually have been caused by wake turbulence.
The Honeywell patent describes a system that could use equipment already in place in commercial airline cockpits to estimate the severity, extent and drift of the wake turbulence behind a selected aircraft. A wake turbulence estimator could take advantage of information acquired by the traffic alert and collision avoidance system to determine an "intruder's" position relative to the "host" aircraft, as well as the weight class of the intruder, information critical to estimating the characteristics of the wake.
The algorithm would also use Honeywell's enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGPWS) to provide information about the intruder's altitude above the ground and distance from the airport, details necessary to estimate the aircraft's configuration with respect to the flaps and landing gear, hence the wake potential of the aircraft. The algorithm would also predict the movement of the vortex in part with local wind strength from a navigation processor, such as GPS.
The results of the computations would then be displayed in the cockpit, potentially using the TCAS itself, with wake vortex algorithms and processing partitioned from the collision avoidance functions. The data would be graphically displayed using visual symbology, with alerts that tell the pilot if the aircraft is predicted to pass through a wake vortex.
Source: Flight International
