Rushing noise on ground under aircraft on short final.
Thread Starter
Rushing noise on ground under aircraft on short final.
Mrs JC and I in West Yorkshire on anniversary weekend. Having been visiting Otley, a favourite of ours, we’ve been walking on The Chevin. On return leg of walk, we were directly under (looking up, between the left engine and the wingtip) of a 737 on about 1 1/2 final (edit: for Leeds-Bradford runway 14.) As it touched down, (we could see the runway from our vantage point.) we heard a ‘whooshing’ noise just above us. The aircraft had long passed and it was different from the airflow noise from a glider or throttled-back light aircraft. I assume we were actually hearing the wake vortexes. Any thoughts on this? Am I correct?
Last edited by Jump Complete; 20th Apr 2019 at 17:03. Reason: Geographical ineptitude. In West, not North Yorkshire!
Thread Starter
Thanks. Having been around and flying aircraft for a long time, to actually experience something only previously experienced in text books (well, apart from a few wake turbulence encounters) was very interesting.
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I live about 12 miles from runway 23 at Manchester and, one day last Autumn an Emirates A380 went overhead at circa 3,000'. Several minutes later the trees started rustling and we felt a breeze, despite the previous flat calm. A (very) rough calculation of height vs time corresponded with wake turbulence decay.
We used to play Ultimate Frisbee at lunchtime on the ball fields outside the Everett Boeing Fitness Center. It's north of the main Boeing campus, almost directly below the approach flight path to the main Paine Field runway. We'd often hear the sound of the wake vortexes ripping through the nearby trees about a minute after a large aircraft passed by on it's way to land. At times they'd even affect the flight path of the Frisbee (although probably not as often as was claimed - 'not my fault my throw was incomplete - a vortex got it' 
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I was attending sim training at CAE/DFW and had time for a round of golf at the course just South of the airport. As a single, I was paired with 3 normal everyday non-aviation people who were also visiting from out of town. I really got a kick out of watching their reaction every time a jet flew right over us to land. First, how fascinated they were seeing airliners fly 300' right over their heads, but even more so when the vortices settled. They kept looking around wondering where that whooshing noise was coming from! After about the tenth time, I just had to let them in on it...
wondering where that whooshing noise was coming from!
Thread creep ceases
G'day Gents,
A view from inside the cockpit.
Often when following a B747 on an overwater approach, for example to RW34L at YSSY across Botany Bay, in still conditions you could clearly see the where the wingtip vortices had descended and left their mark on the water surface of the bay. The southern shore of Botany Bay is about 3nm from the touchdown point and the approach altitude there would be around 1000ft and often the vortex tracks would extend all the way from the landing threshold to the southern shore of the bay spreading outwards as distance from the touchdown point increased.
Cheers,
BH.
A view from inside the cockpit.
Often when following a B747 on an overwater approach, for example to RW34L at YSSY across Botany Bay, in still conditions you could clearly see the where the wingtip vortices had descended and left their mark on the water surface of the bay. The southern shore of Botany Bay is about 3nm from the touchdown point and the approach altitude there would be around 1000ft and often the vortex tracks would extend all the way from the landing threshold to the southern shore of the bay spreading outwards as distance from the touchdown point increased.
Cheers,
BH.
