Forward-look wind-shear detection for microburst recovery

An effort is in progress by NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the industry to reduce the threat of convective microburst wind-shear phenomena to aircraft. This paper describes an effort to quantify the benefits of forward-look sensing and to develop and test a candidate set of strategies for recovery from inadvertent microburst encounters during the landing approach. Initial development of recovery strategies was performed in batch simulation prior to piloted simulation evaluation using a full dynamic airplane model. The results of this effort indicate that the factor that most strongly effects a microburst recovery is the time at which the recovery is initiated. Improving the alert time by 5 s generally provided a greater recovery performance increase than could be achieved by changing the recovery strategy. Forward-look alerts given 10 s prior to microburst entry permitted recoveries to be made with negligible altitude loss. Nomenclature F = wind-shear hazard index g = gravitational acceleration //ref = reference altitude for recovery strategies V = airplane airspeed Wh = vertical wind component, updraft positive Wx = horizontal wind component, along the airplane ground track