A Flight Tested Wake Turbulence Aware Altimeter

A flying aircraft disturbs the local atmosphere through which it flies creating a turbulent vortex at each wing tip known as a wake vortex. These vortices can persist for several minutes and endanger other aircraft traversing that turbulent airspace; large vortices are essentially invisible horizontal tornadoes and are a grave threat to smaller aircraft, especially during landing and take off. Accidents related to wake turbulence have resulted in both loss of life and aircraft destruction in the United States and around the world. Currently no cockpit instrumentation exists that tracks wake vortices and enables a pilot to sense and avoid wake turbulence in real-time. This paper presents a prototype of a novel, flight tested instrument that tracks wake vortices and presents this information to a pilot in real time using a synthetic virtual world augmented with wake turbulence information.