It is commonly recognised today that airport throughput capacity will, amongst others, constitute a bottleneck if traffic demands continues to grow. Studies have demonstrated^1,2 on the one hand that airports are now a major constraint to growth (the cost and impact of airport-related delays having reached parity with those for en-route), and on the other hand that a significant 30% of traffic demand will not be accommodated if the traffic demands continue to grow, even at a conservatively predicted rate, and airport throughput capacity problems are not resolved.

Extending existing airport infrastructure is expensive, requires a long lead time and is often not an option due to environmental considerations. Methods of improving runway throughput using only the existing infrastructure are of increasing interest.

Among others, one potential solution to increase the runway throughput would be to replace the original, static, and hence often over-conservative, wake turbulence separation minima with lower ones based on actual meteorological conditions.

In this context, ADV has developed a recognised expertise covering:

• Support to the definition of innovative concept for wake turbulence reduction (e.g. time-based separation, cross-wind dependent separation);
• Concept modelling (from aircraft performance and flight trajectory to wake encounter risk metrics using state-of-the-art wake turbulence behaviour models, such as WAKE4D³ );
• Concept validation, using the European Operational Concept Validation Methodology (E-OCVM)

ADV has been involved in the development of most of the advanced wake turbulence reduction research programmes, such as EUROCONTROL Time-based Separation project or the CREDOS project (European FP6).

¹ EUROCONTROL Performance Review Commission, Performance Review Report (PRR7), April 2004
² EUROCONTROL, Study on Constraints to Growth, March 2001.
³ WAKE4D is a « 3-D space + time » wake vortex prediction platform software developed by UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium).