Studying Wake Turbulence at Airports Using the Sun as Background

Airports are needing to study the wake turbulence of aircraft taking off at large airports to improve safety. Wake turbulence has caused many accidents between large aircraft and smaller ones literally turning the aircraft upside down and putting it into a death spiral. Only the most advanced pilots can complete the induced roll and fly out of danger. But even so during take off and landing operations at an airport there is significant dangers when you are low and slow.

Due to wake turbulence aircraft are to wait a minimum of three minutes before taking off or landing behind another aircraft. If you are in a light aircraft and the wind is directly down the runway you may wish to wait five minutes to be safe. The times between aircraft means you can take off less aircraft each hour and this can cause traffic delays for airlines costing millions and wasting fuel idling to take off. Additionally upset airline passengers end up missing connecting flights.

To study the wake turbulence there are many methods. Since the wake turbulence creates spiral waves it can be studied easily by using smoke off the wing of the aircraft being studied. Another way is to use lasers and light since the light will show differences as it transfers through the differences in density of the wakes spiral waves.

I propose we use an older technique. Use the Sun as the background and a series of tracks along the runway, which always keeps the sun in the background of the plane as it takes off to catch the wake turbulence waves. These cameras on the tracks will be set up with multiple cameras also running down the track, which keeps the sun between the camera and direction of travel of the wake turbulence. As the plane departs the end of the runway, many cameras on the there tracks will go backwards as the flow of the wake turbulence moves back or at an angle to the runway and tracks. This will get all of the wake turbulence in a panoramic picture, so we can see it perfectly. If we are going to predict wake turbulence correctly, we must know all of it