Quantitative Estimation of Wake Vortex Safety Using the P2p Model

Wake vortex encounter risk is a major safety issue in aircraft final approach phase. The evaluation of the risk is crucial when the industry takes the effort to reduce aircraft spacing for the purpose of capacity gain. This paper proposes a hybrid analytical method to assess the wake vortex encounter risk during the final approach phase. The hybrid method uses probabilistic method to calculate the risk based on the probabilistic distributions of aircraft positions and vortex characteristics obtained from Monte Carlo simulations. The proposed method will be more computational efficient than pure simulations to evaluate the probability of a rare event, such as a serious vortex encounter. In addition, it is able to provide insights about risk distributions with respect to time and location. The estimation given by the model is conservative, which provides effective safety margin to the risk evaluation in a highly stochastic environment.