Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2016
The effect of the wake of a leading aircraft on a following aircraft is demonstrated by calculating the rolling motion consisting of three terms: (i) the free rolling motion due to initial bank angle and roll rate; (ii) the forced wake response due the rolling moment induced by the wake encounter; (iii) the forced control response due to aileron deflection to counter the wake vortex effects. It is shown that in the absence of control action, the roll rate of the following aircraft goes through a peak, and then decays, leading to a constant asymptotic bank angle; the latter is a measure of the magnitude of the wake effect, e.g. is larger for weaker damping. The exact analytical solution of the roll equation appears as a power series of a damping factor, whose coefficients are exponential integrals of time; it is shown that the first two terms give an accuracy better than 2%. The theory is used to simulate 15 combinations of wake vortex encounters between leading and following aircraft in the five ICAO/FAA weight categories: light, medium, heavy, special (B757) and very large (A380).