An Initial Study Of The Sensitivity Of Aircraft Vortex Spacing System Avoss Spacing Sensitivity To Weather And Configuration Input Parameters

A study has been performed on a computer code modeling an aircraft wake vortex spacing system during final approach. This code represents an intial engineering model of a system to calculate reduced approach separation criteria needed to increase airport productivity. This report evaluates model sensitivity toward various weather conditions (crosswind, crosswind variance, turbulent kinetic energy, and thermal gradient), code configurations (approach corridor option, and wake demise definition), and post-processing techniques (rounding of provided spacing values, and controller time variance).

An analysis has been performed on data generated from the two most recent field deployments of the Aircraft Wake Vortex Spacing System (AVOSS). The AVOSS provides reduced aircraft spacing criteria for wake vortex avoidance as compared to the FAA spacing applied under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). Several field deployments culminating in a system demonstration at Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport in the summer of 2000 were successful in showing a sound operational concept and the system's potential to provide a significant benefit to airport operations. For DFW, a predicted average throughput increase of 6% was observed. This increase implies 6 or 7 more aircraft on the ground in a one-hour period for DFE operations. Several studies of performacne correlations to system configuration options, and system inputs are also reported. The studies focus on the validation performance of the system.