Wake turbulence avoidance automation: Evaluation of feasibility and impact

Wake turbulence encounters are a significant concern to pilots flying in the National Airspace System (NAS). The MITRE Corporation's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to increase efficiency and capacity in the NAS that will come with the FAA's Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). By increasing efficiency and capacity, there will be a corresponding reduction in required separations that exist in operations today. As operations are optimized and these separations are reduced, it is important that there is not an increase in wake encounter rates that would tend to limit the acceptance of NextGen. NextGen technology, however, may enable the community to provide better tools to pilots and controllers for avoiding wake, thereby bounding the wake encounter rate at no more than today's operationally acceptable level. In this paper, arrival and departure procedures that take advantage of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS- B) and Cockpit Display of Traffic Information (CDTI) technology in the cockpit are reviewed and their performance during a human-in-the-loop evaluation discussed.