Wind Dependent Concepts for Wake Avoidance: A Comparative Analysis of Capacity Benefits and Implementation Risks

Abstract

The FAA and NASA are jointly embarking on a multiphased research and development program to develop and implement wake vortex avoidance solutions that can safely reduce separations and improve capacity at airports in the NAS. Many options have been proposed by the wake turbulence community and it is necessary to focus research efforts on the most promising solutions. As part of its WakeVAS initiative, NASA has conducted an investigation of the research difficulty and cost for candidate operational enhancements through a Conops evaluation team (CET). This team included participation by stakeholders from many research, system engineering, system development, pilot, and controller organizations. The operational enhancements that were evaluated included wind-dependent concepts for arrivals to closely spaced parallel runways (CSPRs), departures from CSPRs operated as a single runway, arrivals to single runways, and departures from single runways. To complement this work and help provide the information necessary for NASA to focus their research program toward the most promising concepts, MITRE/CAASD performed an analysis of the potential capacity benefit, opportunity for application, and implementation risk for each arrival and departure concept evaluated by the CET. This paper provides an overview of the direction in which NASA research will proceed and the analysis results that help support this decision.