Today’s portable sensors and data-analysis techniques enable scientists worldwide to visualize dimensions, measure velocities and track positions of wake vortices generated by specific variants of large commercial jets. That’s a far cry from igniting elevated smoke pots for low-level overflights in the early 1970s, says Steven Lang, director of the U.S. Center for Air Traffic Systems and Operations at the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.
“Wake turbulence is an inevitable consequence of flight — aircraft lift generation,” Lang said during a Web briefing for news media in November 2012. “Wake turbulence separations in a sense reduce capacity at airports because you have to add spacing behind the larger aircraft for safety mitigation.”
The evolving precision partly explains how several redesigns of air traffic procedures have been accomplished recently, he said, summarizing a paper published in October.1 In the United States, Volpe and t…
