Exploring a flight deck based wake turbulence situational awareness tool

As NextGen concepts move toward increasing en route and terminal throughput, wake turbulence separation may become a limiting factor in the pursuit of capacity improvements. Better knowledge of the probable location of wakes (for air traffic controllers as well as pilots) could help provide safe separation from wake turbulence while avoiding unnecessary restrictions to operations. The Wake Turbulence Avoidance Automation (WTAA) research project, performed under MITRE's Mission Oriented Investigation and Experimentation (MOIE) work for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), demonstrated the use of existing FAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) wake turbulence research and algorithms to estimate wake characteristics given specific aircraft and meteorological data. This capability was used to drive displays of wake information on pilot Cockpit Displays of Traffic Information (CDTIs). This paper provides an overview of the existing FAA and NASA wake research that was leveraged and describes the development of the wake tool and the methods used to provide wake situational awareness to flight crews. Feedback obtained from the human in the loop (HITL) simulations is discussed and recommendations for further development and incorporation of FAA and NASA advances in wake research are provided. For one arrival procedure developed during the research, an analysis of the capacity impact at individual airports and an estimate of the system-wide delay impact of possible arrival procedures enabled by these wake tools is presented.