An attractive use case of air taxis and small aircraft is the establishment of feeder shuttles between airports and urban, respectively sub-urban areas. While fixed-wing aircraft (e.g. HyBird) can use conventional runways, vertiports are built for rotorcraft (e.g. Volocopter) and hybrid concepts (e.g. Lilium). Due to the limited free areas of large airports, vertiports can in many cases only be built close to a conventional runway and thus cannot be operated independently of wake vortices from landing aircraft.

In the DLR project SMART-MET (Flight Safety of Small Aircraft under Adverse Meteorological Conditions), a wake vortex warning system (WSWS-V) for vertiports at large airports is to be developed. The WSWS-V shall be designed for the vertiport planned at Rome Fiumicino Airport, but shall be easily transferable to other airports. The following components of the WSWS-V are needed:

• Based on existing anemometer measurements, a nowcasting system for wind speed and direction is to be developed. The forecasting algorithm shall be created both as a statistical persistence forecast and with machine learning methods. The superior algorithm will finally be determined with a benchmark test.
• The probabilistic wake vortex prediction model P2P is used to forecast the transport and decay of wake vortices within the prescribed limits of the predicted wind.
• To assess the impact of wake vortices, their typical high wind gradients are considered as perturbation effects in the flight mechanics models of different aircraft. An encounter criterion is set depending on the strength of wake vortices in such a way that it can guarantee the necessary stability and controllability for take-offs and landings for specific aircraft types.

The position is located at DLR's Innovation Centre for Small Aircraft Technologies (INK) in Aachen. The work will be carried out in close cooperation with the DLR Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Oberpfaffenhofen and the Institute of Flight System Dynamics at RWTH Aachen University.

Please note that feedback on your application will not be received until early December at the earliest.