Miles closer: aircraft-mounted scanner could close the safe separation gap over busy airports

Engineer, The, July, 2004

AN AIRCRAFT-MOUNTED scanning system that could help to increase the number of planes arriving at busy airports without the need for new runways, is being developed in a European project involving Airbus.

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Current international legislation stipulates that aircraft must maintain a safety distance of up to six miles from each other. This is to ensure that they are unaffected by the turbulence of planes travelling ahead of them.

But according to engineers working on the EU's I-Wake project, although these swirls of air--known as wake vortices--are a hazard to be avoided at all costs, an across-the-board safety distance of six miles is overly cautious.

Dr Thomas Peschel, one of the researchers involved in the project at...