Flying a vortex surfing formation
At night, our widebodies are usually sent out in major packs to international destinations and those flying to the same region of a continent usually end up in one of the two main airways that lead in that direction. Company aircraft launching from other places in the country also end up on the same airways around the same time so we meet them at altitude and are sometimes unable to obtain our optimal flight level for ATC separation purposes.
I look up at the contrails of a company jet flying slightly ahead, 2000 feet above and wonder if we could be flying in tight formation at the same flight level and make use of their wingtip vortexes to augment our lift and save some fuel burn. I asked the captain, he said its a good idea but he's never heard of it. When we're back at the operations center at our hub a few days later, we had a long discussion with the flight crews and they say its been proposed before but spacing regulations in our neighboring country's airspace (& international airspace) forbid the concept was dumped. (domestic flights usually don't meet up that often in my country so we don't bother using it for domestic operations)
Is anyone out there using this concept at the moment? I would suspect large countries like the US would benefit trying this due to long range of some domestic flights and their urge to test new technology (like NexGen + continuous descent approach...) If so, are there any software mods to keep the planes an ideal spacing apart (matching speeds seem to be a disaster waiting to happen, one plane might drift into the other if the A/P doesn't take the location of the other jet into account).