Originally Posted by
Knold
I find it utterly bizarre that this is not part of a certification process for a new aircraft. It should be up to Airbus when designing the monstrosity to study how badly it will effect other traffic.
Ah, but airbus DID study this. I'm sure there must be info available on it publicly, it's quite an interesting piece of work.
airbus link heer for starters ...
Basically, when the 380 was first being brought into service, there were fears expressed that it might have an excessive wake, and various ideas were mooted in terms of an extra-special category for it, extra long separation criteria, etc. All things airbus wanted to avoid if they could justify that, based on actual data rather than a general "its a monster lets treat it like one" reaction.
So they set up a series of wake encounters using a single-aisle as the 'target', various different large aircraft (not just the 380, they wanted to see the behaviour in context) as the generators, plus some other research aircraft gathering data. What they found indicated that the 380 isn't a 'monster' and resulted in the separation criteria we have today. They also had some interesting findings on what the best (and worst) response was by a target finding itself being "waked".