An international cadre of aeronautical engineers is assembling in Toulouse next week in an attempt to capture more data on the A380’s wake turbulence characteristics. The effort, managed by the EASA and Eurocontrol, was prompted by new EASA regulations that require a safety assessment on any new aircraft’s wake before it enters service, and the A380 just happened to be the first aircraft that came along after the regulation was put in place. Aside from satisfying the regulation, however, experts familiar with the topic say there is much concern from air traffic providers on both sides of the Atlantic over the safety of in-trail aircraft.
In Toulouse, engineers from Airbus, the FAA and other organizations will use LIDAR to take a snapshot of the A380’s wake in an attempt to correlate Airbus and FAA computer models with in-situ measurements. Currently engineers at the FAA and NASA are at odds over the results of their models. Airbus’ model tries to find the level of the hazard with respect to what pilots can handle, a metric they determined by exposing pilots to various levels of wake turbulence in a simulator. The FAA/NASA model, on the other hand, gives its results in terms of the intensity of the wake encounter — how large are the forces on the aircraft. Once the measurements and models are correlated, engineers plan to compare the A380-generated turbulence with the well-understood wake field of the 747-400: If the A380’s wake is significantly more intense, a likely solution might be to increase in-trail distance for following aircraft, an unpopular suggestion in the increasingly congested airspace.
The group’s goal is to wrap up its work next year, sending recommendations to ICAO so that it can provide the information to A380 service providers before the aircraft goes into service in mid-2006. — John Croft
