Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2016
The present paper concerns the response of a following airplane to a pair of wing tip vortices left by a leading aircraft, represented by the Hallock-Burnham model, including the effect of vorticity decay between the two aircraft. The effect of vorticity is evaluated in terms of the induced rolling moment and also the lift loss; these specify the roll acceleration and the downward acceleration, respectively. The corresponding two response equations can be put into the same dimensionless form, and integrated using exponential integrals. This specifies the roll rate and sink rate as a function of time; besides the latter, the bank angle and altitude loss, are also plotted, all also as a function of time, for all combinations of leading and following aircraft in five classes. These are the three ICAO weight categories of light, medium and heavy, plus two other cases, viz the special case of the Boeing 757, which requires larger separations distances, and the case of a future very large transport aircraft (VLTA) exceeding significantly the size of a Boeing 747.