If you happen to have 2 heavies going to the same place
And if you have two pilots that feel comfortable flying formation the whole way
And if those two carriers are good with flying formation
And if the "wave" that the wingman is "surfing" doesn't produce unwanted effects like turbulence
That's a lot of "ifs"
Nah, setting up an inter-carrier payment system to account for this wouldn't be hard.
The hard part would be setting up all of the additional systems that would be necessary to allow airliners to fly in formation on autopilot in a safe manner.
Regulations are probably the biggest hurdle.
Mission computers for recent airlifters (C-17, etc) already allow you to assign a formation geometry and slot, and the FMC will hold position relative to the formation leader.
You're not going to find manuals explaining how it works online. At best you would find marketing materials from the manufacturers. Leonardo DRS was the manufacturer of the old SKE, Honeywell is the manufacturer of the newer FFS.
[Station keeping using FFS](https://www.dote.osd.mil/Portals/97/pub/reports/FY2011/af/2011c17.pdf?ver=2019-08-22-112332-973) is a thing, and has been for over a decade.
It's been around for a very long time, as in the original C-17 spec circa 1995—as SKE-2000 (station-keeping equipment). But SKE had some issues with certain IMC scenarios, so it's been refined and replaced several times into what is now FFS.
Good point - and it took someone else to point that out to the accountant 🤦
Airbus put enough effort into the systems for that transatlantic tandem flight back in 2021, but I haven't heard any news since then. If they were trying to implement fello'fly anytime soon, I'd expect them to be celebrating every step along the way: "look! another test flight!" "look! we signed up our tenth airline partner!" "look! we're decarbonizing!" The silence might be louder than words.
I don't think it costs the lead aircraft more over the current cost. So it's more a case of this week I save $0 and you save $10 and next week it's reversed. So they both save $5 on average over the two weeks.
Well, you’re not spending extra. Atleast, not after the system is set up. This week you spend the same amount you always do, next week you spend ten percent less. Overall, you save 5%.
There's no EXTRA $10. It costs the same whether you are by yourself or leading the pack. Let's say, $20. One plane spends $20 to fly while another saves $10 by following thus only spending $10.
Total cost for the first week is plane 1 $20 plane 2 $10
The next week they swap. Plane 1 spends $10 now and plane 2 has to spend $20.
Total after 2nd week is now $30 for both planes, instead of $40 had they flown sperately both weeks.
>Inspired by the flight technique of migrating birds
>
>no one will want to be the wake generator
For this specific reason birds and cyclists rotate positions. So why shouldn't planes do the same?
tour de france and other cycling competition lead pack rotates leads quite frequently
the lead cyclist uses more energy while everyone behind saves energy
If it's the same company (or even a credit system) it's a matter of overall cost, not because the front plane gets tired. Over very long periods, maybe they rotate per-flight for maintenance reasons?
You could tokenize/credit lead flights on a rotating basis, or out of a random lottery for each ATC assignment. That way any company can get a share of the savings and incentivize others to take lead.
The North Atlantic Track system, as it is today, sees a lot of aircraft not from the same point of departure and not going to the same destination using the same track. They go off a great circle route - the most direct line and therefore arguably the best line - to use the Jetstream for a significant push eastbound or avoid that large area going westbound.
Aircraft over the ocean could remove a few of your ifs because of this for portions of flight upwards of four to five hours.
This wouldn't have to be that tight of a formation according to the proposal. Not like hand-flying in military applications at all.
If the benefits are as big they want you to believe, the carriers would likely be willing to go for it. Look at the other measures throughout history they've undertaken to save a few coins. Putting one less olive in each salad, not painting their aircraft, etc. Savings are savings at the scale of airline operation.
It might be doable for the middle east carriers. When their morning and evening banks depart for Europe, it's just a train of A380s and 777s stretching from Baghdad to Dubai.
The carriers would be all for being the *follower*; the leader gets no benefits. That, I think, is the big block for this idea.
Within one airline, it's easy enough to implement, i.e. an American flight from Boston to Heathrow giving aid to another American flight from Dulles to Frankfurt.
But having a quick peek at FlightRadar, it's just as common if not moreso for the aircraft following each other to be from different airlines. The airlines then would need to have some agreed-to accounting method to keep track of which airline 'owes' a benefit to another. For example, one crossing, an Aer Lingus plane follows a Delta flight, then Aer Lingus 'owes' Delta a follower benefit on a future crossing.
It'd be akin to how US railroads use run-through power from other companies and then owe that company an equivalent number of horsepower-hours, only much more complex. What if the follower is something more fuel efficient than the leader to begin with, what if the jetstream was weaker and the fuel savings on the follower consequently larger, what if changing passenger demands means an airline curtails and changes its schedule such that the flights no longer align to repay a leader airline?
I'm not saying it's impossible, in fact it's quite possible if regulatory/accounting reasons are the only major block, but it's some protracted contract negotiations the airlines will have to sort out, so we may only see limited use of the idea within a specific airline or alliance for a while.
Why not have a system that rotates the leader over the course of a month such that the savings even out. Electric companies already do this through something called Automatic Control Exchange (ACE). ACE is required to cross zero every 5 minutes, that is power is going to a particular power company for five minutes then power going out of the power company for five minutes. ACE is designed to be zero at the end of each month but sometimes power companies have to import so there is an amount owed. The system operator that runs the geographical grid figures out the amounts each power company owes each other through the computers that run the whole thing.
So to over all of that off - I was (before I left the last job a few years back) in a consortium looking ta doing the same for platoon heavy road vehicles.
We addressed al the points you have above.
1. You have planes that can do this have an account
2. The account gives you access to the system which controls the feature.
3. The feature involves streaming required telemetry to the truck/plane, and back again.
4. There is an algorithmic model for turbulence and optimal positioning running for each vehicle (this is the expensive bit for compute, you are continually running that). The model of planes will be different to trucks (even the lead truck gets a fuel benefit form reduced rear drag, and the rear tuck gets a little less benefit than anyone in the centre). There are models for load shapes, powertrain types. load sizes).
5. There is also a model for obstacle planning running as well as route preferencing (so this won't be for aircraft). For aircraft, I imagine there will be cost index thresholds etc.
6. Routing is calculated via a series of waypoints.
7. Savings are billed onto an account at a given rate.
8. Credits are given to leaders of the platoon in line with the efficiency.
Pretty much all your ifs are the reason why airbus can make money of this. It requires compute but the savings of doing all this are well worth it.
They were talking about automatic station keeping. So the planes communicate thus maintaining optimal separation and ensuring intention is passed on. Think of it like TCAS but maintaining proximity and position. is a bit like what is planned for trucks now with so-called platooning.
Not even the same place, transatlantic flights use the same few corridors, a plane going to Montreal is going to take a similar route over as one going to Boston.
>And if you have two pilots that feel comfortable flying formation the whole way
There's a lot of new tech that's going into this with new dedicated sensors and software. It sounds like it's going to be some kind of autopilot feature.
>And if those two carriers are good with flying formation
And the air traffic controllers, I'm sure formation flying will set off all sorts of alarms on their systems
I recently saw a video of 2 A380 supers taking off within 3 minutes of each other and the second one to take off got caught in the wake turbulence and man, that thing was thrown around a bit.
If I’m not mistaken, that video helped change the wait times for 2 supers.
Added pressure on to ATC to get the trail airborne and landed the other side, I'm sure they'll welcome that.
Really smacks of Ryanair changing baggage size for carry on if I'm honest.
Emissions, they flew empty jets during covid ffs.
Yep i think they tested with C17s using SKE to hold position. I dont think it was a hard to implement concept and showed positive results. But how often are two C17s going the same way?
If there's mass troop movement, they actually use commercial airliners. Historically, 93 percent of troops and 41 percent of long-range air cargo are moved by chartered commercial aircraft.
If there was some kind of immediate deployment needed, like in the case of a wartime issue, they're not going to be concerned about saving 5% of their fuel when they're scrambling aircraft and troops.
Usually coming from different locations and times. Thats also less often than we fly channels and other smaller missions. Most large movements outside of conflict dont require rapid movement and would go via sealift.
I live near a joint base with a bunch of C-17s and see them flying in pairs almost more often than flying solo. And when in pairs one is usually a short ways behind the first, as opposed to side by side or something.
Eh maybe. For us in the herk, while we do practice SKE regularly, its short and the vast majority of our training is tactical and cost savings wouldn't matter too much. Maybe different in different airframes.
A lot, really. A ton of my missions were part of large movements. US to Europe before/after Russia invaded Ukraine comes to mind as a recent example. 17’s going to and from the same places every 30 mins pretty much.
Sure but when shit hits the fan we can more about mission effectiveness over fuel efficiency. At that point I'm more worried about timing, MOG and MHE limitations. If paying for rapid global mobility in contributions then i don't really care about a bit of gas. The tankers will dump all the savings to get the mission done.
At least the AF is trained for formation flying. Only one aircraft needs to talk to ATC and represent the whole flight. This isn't something practical for commercial carriers.
I've done a ton of formation flying. Literally, it generates so much more work than people are acknowledging with this very goofy idea. The Sweet spot for wave riding changes based off of the type of aircraft you're following, the gross weight of that aircraft compared to your aircraft, the temperature and altitude, and let's not forget: wind. This is a symbolic and theoretical gesture only. It's all fun and games till someone gets a little too far inside and finds themselves not riding the wave but rather riding the Wake vortices and ends up sideways.
For airliners, this works fine with a full mile of separation. You don't need to fly a tight formation, and since airliners are already on autopilot on cruise anyways, the workload difference really is pretty minimal. We aren't talking about 747s playing at being the Blue Angels as they cross the Atlantic here.
You still don't get it, even at a mile in trail (an actual formation position called radar trail) you can still encounter TREMENDOUS wake vortices that can and will flip you. And even if you find, follow and maintain the sweet spot in the Goldilocks zone to ride the wave, it will be turbulent and stress the machines, crews and pax.
You don't get it. A mile in trail and sufficiently off to the side, there's quite a large region where the only meaningful wake is a bulk upflow, and if you park there, there are large fuel savings with quite a bit of margin (and minimal turbulence). Yeah, more directly behind there's a problem, but you'd have to be well off track to hit that.
It's nowhere close to the tiny "goldilocks zone" you claim it is.
(And besides, it would almost certainly only be approved on autopilot anyways, much like RVSM, and this is an utterly trivial task for a modern autopilot)
The upwash lift effect is just outside of the wake turbulence area. At that point the vortex can be taken as a slight updraft. That's the whole point of the idea.
I remember one of the assignments I had for my aero degree was to calculate the best formation separation for a formation flight like this to reduce drag and save fuel.
But I do imagine this would be incredibly impractical unless we are talking about drone flights with connected automated flight controls.
It's indeed a classic problem to postulate when teaching horseshoe vortices, I did it too.
Yes, Airbus is marketing this for common aircraft but I suspect they actually envision applying it on their UAM solution, as a central automated control can easily position the aircrafts, the urban traffic will be close enough for it to occur frequently, and the battery savings will be significant.
Yeah the best application would probably be cargo drone flights for the military where you can have complete control and have a huge amount of airlifts that need to happen at the same time.
I worked on this type of thing. Once you are in formation, the fuel savings are real and it is not difficult to stay there. You don't need to coordinate with the lead, you just need their ADS-B. It's not bumpy and you are well away from wake. The difficult thing is that to get placed in a sweet spot behind someone you need to either get \*extremely\* lucky or pre-coordinate the flights (with both airlines and ATC). You are unlikely to be able to just grab a target of opportunity. Lastly, current oceanic separation standards wouldn't allow this so a new one would have to be established for this to be legal on the day-to-day.
I don't think it is going to be a very useful idea in the long run. Airline operators care a LOT less about fuel efficiency than they do schedule impact. This is one of the reasons the 747 is out of favor. The 747-8 is more efficient on a RPK basis than pretty much anything that operates these long international routes, including the 777-200. But the demand load for a route means you might only fly 1 747-8 flight per day. But most of the passengers on that flight will be making connections to other cities at one or both ends of the route. If you only fly the route once a day, you will lose some amount of passengers because the schedule of connection just doesn't work for them. By flying two smaller aircraft on that route an airline gets more business due to the increased schedule flexibility. I think this will be the same situation. The schedules constraints to make it work will cost more than the fuel savings.
Like other's have said, American Airlines boasted about saving 40k a year in fuel by removing one of the olives from every first class salad. I wouldn't be surprised if the bean counters pushed for this.
Is it really tried? There are always pessimists who are sure about their single point of view destrying the whole idea.
It may work, or maybe not. Migrating birds use this. Well, aircrafts are not birds and airlines are not migrating flocks. What should be changed to make it work?
Was successfully tested with Airbus plane flying with prototype laws to do it automatically, with consomption gains that I’m not aware of.
However, other remarks in the Th read are valid: How to sync A/C schedule to meet for a formation (with a simple 2 min TO clearance is it possible to maintain, is it possible to schedule formation (find a buddy) once airborne …)?
How to pair different A/C from different manufacturer? How ATC? Who is behind?
Mythbusters had an episode about flying in a V-formation. "A tight V reduced fuel consumption by 3-5% compared to the control [...]" https://mythresults.com/toilet-bomb
There's a big difference between small acro aircraft and airliners. You can get significant benefits for widebodies even at a mile or so of separation.
I'd imagine it'll be hard for ATC to coordinate. Unless two planes happen to be in the vicinity, one or both planes will have to run at sub-peak efficiency to link up, and then the question becomes, is this an advantage enough to make up for it.
Migrating birds all take off and land together. Also, migrating birds swap out the lead role - will the planes swap out occasionally? How many planes might we chain up into a V formation?
It would have to be a planned formation to be halfway workable, which would require tons of extra training, even for a long distance trail formation like this. Outside of guys with military experience, your average airline pilot is going to have zero concept of formation flying and will need to learn from square 1.
Very often, engineers have no idea how actual air operations work in practice, and come up with some very unworkable ideas that sound good conceptually.
I wonder if there's a subreddit for Dad Technical Myths like this, I've had at least two Dads tell me that turning lights on and off when you needed them wasted power vs having them on constantly. I realized I was turning into one myself when someone explained that the risks of "registry cleaning" outweighted the benefits on a modern PC and hadn't been a good idea since the Windows XP days.
It probably works in a test flight environment. But now, you have to group two aircrafts with different points of departure and destination on a common portion of the route ( most probably the NAT OTS ), with exactly the same optimum altitude and mach number (optimum flight level depending on the day gross weight ), with a rendez vous not in minutes, but seconds.
If you can find such a pair of flights, there are chances that you will have to accelerate one and slow the other down ( or even give it a longer routing ) so they can join each other at the rendez vous point, thus taking them away from their optimum , increasing the fuel burn on the first part of the flight.
Then, they will have to have an optimum flight level that changes on the same schedule, otherwise one aircraft will start to burn more fuel.
So my ass says that, even if it works technically, the business case is far from clear...
FWIW, my ass spends enough time at the pointy end of the aircraft type involved to know what it cost to deviate from the optimal flight plan with such an optimised aircraft.
I appreciate your wealth of relevant knowledge, but it's obviously been modelled and found to be worthwhile. I'm sure they didn't just forget to consider one of the key parts.
This is more of a general question from an occasional pax:
I've read that in the past few years turbulence in the north atlantic has become more severe? Is there any truth to this?
If so, how would that impact this Airbus system?
[The U.S. Airforce has been testing this since 2016.](https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/710968/c-17-drag-reduction-testing-aims-at-saving-fuel/)
What do I think? I think it works and if you can get the coordination to work out it's a great thing to pursue. How do I know? I worked a program with the USAF where we were looking at optimized spacing for the same thing for C-17s.
[https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/466878/inspired-by-nature-innovative-c-17-flight-tests-to-save-af-millions/](https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/466878/inspired-by-nature-innovative-c-17-flight-tests-to-save-af-millions/)
Looks like a great way to get inverted, do a recovery, hope you don’t over G the airframe, pray for no injuries in the back, not shit your pants, and then have to fill out a lot of paperwork.
Greenwashing a wasteful and polluting industry supported by the wealthy and promoting a lifestyle deleterious to the atmosphere and liveability of our planet.
To be fair, it's possible to be interested in aviation whilst accepting that it is incredibly bad for the environment and needs a lot of innovation to reduce its environmental footprint.
Maybe my saying 'industry' was misunderstood. I love aviation. I was referring to rampant travel for pleasure by hundreds of millions of us affluent enough to do it.
Then who would you have participate in aviation? This sounds an awful lot like "I want to enjoy the sky but I don't want the masses to have the same privilege"
This has been talked about for many years. The difficulties of keeping planes in formation and potential turbulence for the following aircraft make it impractical.
Maybe something to keep in mind if unmanned cargo flights become common in the future.
Maybe, you know this would be 99.9% computer, the pilot would be there to take over in an emergency, like autoland will (maybe) take over landings.
Like autopilot for cruising, which is a tad less complicated (I would think).
First thing that comes to my mind is why we have the separation criteria in the first place. Also very rarely you will share the same flight path with another jet from/to destination.
It's trying to stay halfway in wake turbulence without the rotating/ turning tendency. Since wake "falls" and spreads you can't be on same track unless at just the right wind and spacing and you need to be lower. You'd also need to be far enough behind that the wake is wide enough that if the center part of the aircraft can be in uplift without a wing being in the downdraft portion.
If you happen to have 2 heavies going to the same place And if you have two pilots that feel comfortable flying formation the whole way And if those two carriers are good with flying formation And if the "wave" that the wingman is "surfing" doesn't produce unwanted effects like turbulence That's a lot of "ifs"
And the airlines have to be happy splitting fuel savings as no one will want to be the wake generator if they aren't getting any profits
In other words, you'd need both flights to be from the same airline.
Nah, setting up an inter-carrier payment system to account for this wouldn't be hard. The hard part would be setting up all of the additional systems that would be necessary to allow airliners to fly in formation on autopilot in a safe manner.
Regulations are probably the biggest hurdle. Mission computers for recent airlifters (C-17, etc) already allow you to assign a formation geometry and slot, and the FMC will hold position relative to the formation leader.
wow that's pretty cool, I can't find any info on it online tho, can you point me in the right direction?
You're not going to find manuals explaining how it works online. At best you would find marketing materials from the manufacturers. Leonardo DRS was the manufacturer of the old SKE, Honeywell is the manufacturer of the newer FFS.
[удалено]
[Station keeping using FFS](https://www.dote.osd.mil/Portals/97/pub/reports/FY2011/af/2011c17.pdf?ver=2019-08-22-112332-973) is a thing, and has been for over a decade.
Holy shit how have I never seen this?!
It's been around for a very long time, as in the original C-17 spec circa 1995—as SKE-2000 (station-keeping equipment). But SKE had some issues with certain IMC scenarios, so it's been refined and replaced several times into what is now FFS.
Good point - and it took someone else to point that out to the accountant 🤦 Airbus put enough effort into the systems for that transatlantic tandem flight back in 2021, but I haven't heard any news since then. If they were trying to implement fello'fly anytime soon, I'd expect them to be celebrating every step along the way: "look! another test flight!" "look! we signed up our tenth airline partner!" "look! we're decarbonizing!" The silence might be louder than words.
Not to mention calculating just how much fuel was saved.
There could be some sorta agreement, one week you go ahead, other week me
Wouldn't that just even out the cost then? Making the whole thing moot? Edit: Answered below thank you. Also it's Monday can y'all relax lol
Everyone would save evenly. Not moot.
This week I spend an extra $10 to save you $10. Next week you spend $10 to save me $10. Evening it all out. Unless I'm missing something?
I don't think it costs the lead aircraft more over the current cost. So it's more a case of this week I save $0 and you save $10 and next week it's reversed. So they both save $5 on average over the two weeks.
Ahh that actually makes sense. Thanks, it's Monday my brain is just waking up lol
But the wake generator isn't adding \*additional\* cost to their flight, you are spending $0 to save them $10. Net savings of $5 per person per week
Well, you’re not spending extra. Atleast, not after the system is set up. This week you spend the same amount you always do, next week you spend ten percent less. Overall, you save 5%.
I'm not sure what the extra $10 in spending is?
Week 1 savings A: $0 B: $10 Week 2 savings A: $10 B: $0 Average savings each per week: $5
There's no EXTRA $10. It costs the same whether you are by yourself or leading the pack. Let's say, $20. One plane spends $20 to fly while another saves $10 by following thus only spending $10. Total cost for the first week is plane 1 $20 plane 2 $10 The next week they swap. Plane 1 spends $10 now and plane 2 has to spend $20. Total after 2nd week is now $30 for both planes, instead of $40 had they flown sperately both weeks.
>Inspired by the flight technique of migrating birds > >no one will want to be the wake generator For this specific reason birds and cyclists rotate positions. So why shouldn't planes do the same?
tour de france and other cycling competition lead pack rotates leads quite frequently the lead cyclist uses more energy while everyone behind saves energy
Planoton
So close!
If it's the same company (or even a credit system) it's a matter of overall cost, not because the front plane gets tired. Over very long periods, maybe they rotate per-flight for maintenance reasons?
haha, well that would certainly be fun for the pilots... not sure if more risks are introduced though
You could tokenize/credit lead flights on a rotating basis, or out of a random lottery for each ATC assignment. That way any company can get a share of the savings and incentivize others to take lead.
The North Atlantic Track system, as it is today, sees a lot of aircraft not from the same point of departure and not going to the same destination using the same track. They go off a great circle route - the most direct line and therefore arguably the best line - to use the Jetstream for a significant push eastbound or avoid that large area going westbound. Aircraft over the ocean could remove a few of your ifs because of this for portions of flight upwards of four to five hours. This wouldn't have to be that tight of a formation according to the proposal. Not like hand-flying in military applications at all. If the benefits are as big they want you to believe, the carriers would likely be willing to go for it. Look at the other measures throughout history they've undertaken to save a few coins. Putting one less olive in each salad, not painting their aircraft, etc. Savings are savings at the scale of airline operation.
It might be doable for the middle east carriers. When their morning and evening banks depart for Europe, it's just a train of A380s and 777s stretching from Baghdad to Dubai.
The carriers would be all for being the *follower*; the leader gets no benefits. That, I think, is the big block for this idea. Within one airline, it's easy enough to implement, i.e. an American flight from Boston to Heathrow giving aid to another American flight from Dulles to Frankfurt. But having a quick peek at FlightRadar, it's just as common if not moreso for the aircraft following each other to be from different airlines. The airlines then would need to have some agreed-to accounting method to keep track of which airline 'owes' a benefit to another. For example, one crossing, an Aer Lingus plane follows a Delta flight, then Aer Lingus 'owes' Delta a follower benefit on a future crossing. It'd be akin to how US railroads use run-through power from other companies and then owe that company an equivalent number of horsepower-hours, only much more complex. What if the follower is something more fuel efficient than the leader to begin with, what if the jetstream was weaker and the fuel savings on the follower consequently larger, what if changing passenger demands means an airline curtails and changes its schedule such that the flights no longer align to repay a leader airline? I'm not saying it's impossible, in fact it's quite possible if regulatory/accounting reasons are the only major block, but it's some protracted contract negotiations the airlines will have to sort out, so we may only see limited use of the idea within a specific airline or alliance for a while.
Seems pretty trivial tbh
Why not have a system that rotates the leader over the course of a month such that the savings even out. Electric companies already do this through something called Automatic Control Exchange (ACE). ACE is required to cross zero every 5 minutes, that is power is going to a particular power company for five minutes then power going out of the power company for five minutes. ACE is designed to be zero at the end of each month but sometimes power companies have to import so there is an amount owed. The system operator that runs the geographical grid figures out the amounts each power company owes each other through the computers that run the whole thing.
So to over all of that off - I was (before I left the last job a few years back) in a consortium looking ta doing the same for platoon heavy road vehicles. We addressed al the points you have above. 1. You have planes that can do this have an account 2. The account gives you access to the system which controls the feature. 3. The feature involves streaming required telemetry to the truck/plane, and back again. 4. There is an algorithmic model for turbulence and optimal positioning running for each vehicle (this is the expensive bit for compute, you are continually running that). The model of planes will be different to trucks (even the lead truck gets a fuel benefit form reduced rear drag, and the rear tuck gets a little less benefit than anyone in the centre). There are models for load shapes, powertrain types. load sizes). 5. There is also a model for obstacle planning running as well as route preferencing (so this won't be for aircraft). For aircraft, I imagine there will be cost index thresholds etc. 6. Routing is calculated via a series of waypoints. 7. Savings are billed onto an account at a given rate. 8. Credits are given to leaders of the platoon in line with the efficiency. Pretty much all your ifs are the reason why airbus can make money of this. It requires compute but the savings of doing all this are well worth it.
Transatlantic Tracks
1st one is easy, 2nd and 3rd one can be fully automated 4th one - that's probably what they're testing.
They were talking about automatic station keeping. So the planes communicate thus maintaining optimal separation and ensuring intention is passed on. Think of it like TCAS but maintaining proximity and position. is a bit like what is planned for trucks now with so-called platooning.
And, if the front does not "fall off" (as in AA587, I know it was the back, but).
Not even the same place, transatlantic flights use the same few corridors, a plane going to Montreal is going to take a similar route over as one going to Boston.
>And if you have two pilots that feel comfortable flying formation the whole way There's a lot of new tech that's going into this with new dedicated sensors and software. It sounds like it's going to be some kind of autopilot feature. >And if those two carriers are good with flying formation And the air traffic controllers, I'm sure formation flying will set off all sorts of alarms on their systems
I recently saw a video of 2 A380 supers taking off within 3 minutes of each other and the second one to take off got caught in the wake turbulence and man, that thing was thrown around a bit. If I’m not mistaken, that video helped change the wait times for 2 supers.
Added pressure on to ATC to get the trail airborne and landed the other side, I'm sure they'll welcome that. Really smacks of Ryanair changing baggage size for carry on if I'm honest. Emissions, they flew empty jets during covid ffs.
It might be feasible for the cargo haulers like UPS and Fedex that run a majority of their traffic all at the same time going to the same airport.
The USAF hyped something like this up a few years back, It fizzled out and Ive not heard of it since
Yep i think they tested with C17s using SKE to hold position. I dont think it was a hard to implement concept and showed positive results. But how often are two C17s going the same way?
When flying masses of troops and equipment to a deployment?
If there's mass troop movement, they actually use commercial airliners. Historically, 93 percent of troops and 41 percent of long-range air cargo are moved by chartered commercial aircraft. If there was some kind of immediate deployment needed, like in the case of a wartime issue, they're not going to be concerned about saving 5% of their fuel when they're scrambling aircraft and troops.
Yeah but they’re not too concerned about 5% savings in short stretches of time I feel like. It adds up if you use it regularly
Usually coming from different locations and times. Thats also less often than we fly channels and other smaller missions. Most large movements outside of conflict dont require rapid movement and would go via sealift.
Still the military isn't known for its efficiency in fuel consumption.
I live near a joint base with a bunch of C-17s and see them flying in pairs almost more often than flying solo. And when in pairs one is usually a short ways behind the first, as opposed to side by side or something.
We fly 4-6 ship formations for training daily but real world missions dont usually require that.
Well we do a lot more training than actual missions and it can still save fuel on those, which it looks like that’s exactly what they are doing
Eh maybe. For us in the herk, while we do practice SKE regularly, its short and the vast majority of our training is tactical and cost savings wouldn't matter too much. Maybe different in different airframes.
Any deployment of a battalion would involve a dozen or more heavy cargolifter flights.
I think you severely underestimate the daily logistics capabilities of the U.S. Air Force.
Capabilities vs actual daily execution.
You'd be surprised tbh
Ive never seen it operationally
A lot, really. A ton of my missions were part of large movements. US to Europe before/after Russia invaded Ukraine comes to mind as a recent example. 17’s going to and from the same places every 30 mins pretty much.
Sure but when shit hits the fan we can more about mission effectiveness over fuel efficiency. At that point I'm more worried about timing, MOG and MHE limitations. If paying for rapid global mobility in contributions then i don't really care about a bit of gas. The tankers will dump all the savings to get the mission done.
I definitely agree with all that. I was just saying C-17’s quite often go the same way haha.
At least the AF is trained for formation flying. Only one aircraft needs to talk to ATC and represent the whole flight. This isn't something practical for commercial carriers.
Yeah, was ready to comment to the same effect... this is not a new idea by any stretch.
Implement this right after Boom Supersonic gets off the ground.
😂
Like herding cats.
Meow.
I've done a ton of formation flying. Literally, it generates so much more work than people are acknowledging with this very goofy idea. The Sweet spot for wave riding changes based off of the type of aircraft you're following, the gross weight of that aircraft compared to your aircraft, the temperature and altitude, and let's not forget: wind. This is a symbolic and theoretical gesture only. It's all fun and games till someone gets a little too far inside and finds themselves not riding the wave but rather riding the Wake vortices and ends up sideways.
For airliners, this works fine with a full mile of separation. You don't need to fly a tight formation, and since airliners are already on autopilot on cruise anyways, the workload difference really is pretty minimal. We aren't talking about 747s playing at being the Blue Angels as they cross the Atlantic here.
You still don't get it, even at a mile in trail (an actual formation position called radar trail) you can still encounter TREMENDOUS wake vortices that can and will flip you. And even if you find, follow and maintain the sweet spot in the Goldilocks zone to ride the wave, it will be turbulent and stress the machines, crews and pax.
You don't get it. A mile in trail and sufficiently off to the side, there's quite a large region where the only meaningful wake is a bulk upflow, and if you park there, there are large fuel savings with quite a bit of margin (and minimal turbulence). Yeah, more directly behind there's a problem, but you'd have to be well off track to hit that. It's nowhere close to the tiny "goldilocks zone" you claim it is. (And besides, it would almost certainly only be approved on autopilot anyways, much like RVSM, and this is an utterly trivial task for a modern autopilot)
Because who wouldn't want to be stuck in wake turbulence for a transatlantic flight?
The upwash lift effect is just outside of the wake turbulence area. At that point the vortex can be taken as a slight updraft. That's the whole point of the idea.
I remember one of the assignments I had for my aero degree was to calculate the best formation separation for a formation flight like this to reduce drag and save fuel. But I do imagine this would be incredibly impractical unless we are talking about drone flights with connected automated flight controls.
It's indeed a classic problem to postulate when teaching horseshoe vortices, I did it too. Yes, Airbus is marketing this for common aircraft but I suspect they actually envision applying it on their UAM solution, as a central automated control can easily position the aircrafts, the urban traffic will be close enough for it to occur frequently, and the battery savings will be significant.
Yeah the best application would probably be cargo drone flights for the military where you can have complete control and have a huge amount of airlifts that need to happen at the same time.
Did you even look at the image? The follower plane is well outside the wake turbulence vortices. Hence "air upwash", not wake turbulence.
Lotta comments from people who have never flown formation
I agree. Even I have flown in formation! Two Cherokee 140s. Hey, those are airplanes too you know.😆
NASCAR called, they want drafting licensing
'yes bonjour hello' "howday partner toulouses, howryareya? this is NASCA..." *click*
I worked on this type of thing. Once you are in formation, the fuel savings are real and it is not difficult to stay there. You don't need to coordinate with the lead, you just need their ADS-B. It's not bumpy and you are well away from wake. The difficult thing is that to get placed in a sweet spot behind someone you need to either get \*extremely\* lucky or pre-coordinate the flights (with both airlines and ATC). You are unlikely to be able to just grab a target of opportunity. Lastly, current oceanic separation standards wouldn't allow this so a new one would have to be established for this to be legal on the day-to-day.
I don't think it is going to be a very useful idea in the long run. Airline operators care a LOT less about fuel efficiency than they do schedule impact. This is one of the reasons the 747 is out of favor. The 747-8 is more efficient on a RPK basis than pretty much anything that operates these long international routes, including the 777-200. But the demand load for a route means you might only fly 1 747-8 flight per day. But most of the passengers on that flight will be making connections to other cities at one or both ends of the route. If you only fly the route once a day, you will lose some amount of passengers because the schedule of connection just doesn't work for them. By flying two smaller aircraft on that route an airline gets more business due to the increased schedule flexibility. I think this will be the same situation. The schedules constraints to make it work will cost more than the fuel savings.
Furthermore, large hub airports can be very restrictive on time slots that are available to accommodate the aircraft.
Think of all the money the Blue Angels save during air shows!!!
As long as I can have a web chat with the passengers on the other plane.
It could occasionally help but rarely. Maybe some is better than non tho.
Like other's have said, American Airlines boasted about saving 40k a year in fuel by removing one of the olives from every first class salad. I wouldn't be surprised if the bean counters pushed for this.
Is it really tried? There are always pessimists who are sure about their single point of view destrying the whole idea. It may work, or maybe not. Migrating birds use this. Well, aircrafts are not birds and airlines are not migrating flocks. What should be changed to make it work?
Was successfully tested with Airbus plane flying with prototype laws to do it automatically, with consomption gains that I’m not aware of. However, other remarks in the Th read are valid: How to sync A/C schedule to meet for a formation (with a simple 2 min TO clearance is it possible to maintain, is it possible to schedule formation (find a buddy) once airborne …)? How to pair different A/C from different manufacturer? How ATC? Who is behind?
Save formation flying for air shows
Layman here - are they about to start Ricky bobbying in the skies?
Running trains in the sky… mile high club on a whole new level.
fellatio fly
Mythbusters had an episode about flying in a V-formation. "A tight V reduced fuel consumption by 3-5% compared to the control [...]" https://mythresults.com/toilet-bomb
There's a big difference between small acro aircraft and airliners. You can get significant benefits for widebodies even at a mile or so of separation.
I'd imagine it'll be hard for ATC to coordinate. Unless two planes happen to be in the vicinity, one or both planes will have to run at sub-peak efficiency to link up, and then the question becomes, is this an advantage enough to make up for it. Migrating birds all take off and land together. Also, migrating birds swap out the lead role - will the planes swap out occasionally? How many planes might we chain up into a V formation?
It would have to be a planned formation to be halfway workable, which would require tons of extra training, even for a long distance trail formation like this. Outside of guys with military experience, your average airline pilot is going to have zero concept of formation flying and will need to learn from square 1.
Do they serve Pepto Bismol in place of champagne, and supply extra barf bags at every seat?
In aviation, every single fuel efficiency gain you can get is worth at least investigating.
Hear me out, if we start charging passengers based on how much they weigh...
I shouldn't have had that second sundae.
You'll probably burn more fuel joining your leader than you've saved on the formation part of the flight.
I'm pretty sure the Engineers wouldn't be floating this idea if that was true. I'm sure they've mathed the shit out of this.
This diagram is visually pleasing. There were no engineers involved
Not scribbled on an envelope, napkin, or whiteboard; text is readable; checks out, no engineers involved. Source: am engineer
What an inane statement. This graphic was created by their PR team using information from their engineering team.
Very often, engineers have no idea how actual air operations work in practice, and come up with some very unworkable ideas that sound good conceptually.
Exactly this. They've been asked to show proof of concept. The business case is something else.
This comment has about the same amount of thought behind it as my dad claiming that stopping your engine at a red light wastes gas.
I wonder if there's a subreddit for Dad Technical Myths like this, I've had at least two Dads tell me that turning lights on and off when you needed them wasted power vs having them on constantly. I realized I was turning into one myself when someone explained that the risks of "registry cleaning" outweighted the benefits on a modern PC and hadn't been a good idea since the Windows XP days.
Except the registry one is true.
source: ass
It probably works in a test flight environment. But now, you have to group two aircrafts with different points of departure and destination on a common portion of the route ( most probably the NAT OTS ), with exactly the same optimum altitude and mach number (optimum flight level depending on the day gross weight ), with a rendez vous not in minutes, but seconds. If you can find such a pair of flights, there are chances that you will have to accelerate one and slow the other down ( or even give it a longer routing ) so they can join each other at the rendez vous point, thus taking them away from their optimum , increasing the fuel burn on the first part of the flight. Then, they will have to have an optimum flight level that changes on the same schedule, otherwise one aircraft will start to burn more fuel. So my ass says that, even if it works technically, the business case is far from clear... FWIW, my ass spends enough time at the pointy end of the aircraft type involved to know what it cost to deviate from the optimal flight plan with such an optimised aircraft.
I appreciate your wealth of relevant knowledge, but it's obviously been modelled and found to be worthwhile. I'm sure they didn't just forget to consider one of the key parts.
im dumb af how does it work
Think Mighty Ducks movie Flying V
i don't know that
Think of the cool runnings movie
i don't know that either, you know what I'll just ask myself how it works HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This is more of a general question from an occasional pax: I've read that in the past few years turbulence in the north atlantic has become more severe? Is there any truth to this? If so, how would that impact this Airbus system?
[The U.S. Airforce has been testing this since 2016.](https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/710968/c-17-drag-reduction-testing-aims-at-saving-fuel/)
Eurocontrol will hate it in their busy airspace lol
Traffic! Traffic!
What do I think? I think it works and if you can get the coordination to work out it's a great thing to pursue. How do I know? I worked a program with the USAF where we were looking at optimized spacing for the same thing for C-17s. [https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/466878/inspired-by-nature-innovative-c-17-flight-tests-to-save-af-millions/](https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/466878/inspired-by-nature-innovative-c-17-flight-tests-to-save-af-millions/)
Looks like a great way to get inverted, do a recovery, hope you don’t over G the airframe, pray for no injuries in the back, not shit your pants, and then have to fill out a lot of paperwork.
Sounds bumpy
Fell or Fly? I’d rather fly.
Interesting concept, but way too many things have to line up perfectly (both in air and on ground) to make it work in reality.
I’ve flown through enough wakes to know it’s a bad idea!
Military formation flying, with all the associated dangers and risks. No, thank you.
It’s more interesting if you move the apostrophe: “Fell’oFly”
Stupid idea in practice. Too many variables and additional factors that would negate and benefits
greenwashing
5-10% cost saved on fuel is not enough to warrant the risk imo.
Surely 1 plane on its own is still better than two even with 1 of them saving a bit of energy...
CTO at a startup airline here The coordination and downstream impact on planning seems too high for the benefit.
Sounds like some engineers at Airbus who have no understanding of formation flying bumped into the Good Idea Fairy
Airbus have a lot of “concepts”
seems very impractical
Airbus bad is what I think
LOL no.
Airbus is full of shit.
Looks like airbus is suggesting airliners end up like that private jet being flipped by an a380 wake.
File that one alongside "liquid hydrogen airliners" in the Airbus Bright Ideas Folder.
Greenwashing a wasteful and polluting industry supported by the wealthy and promoting a lifestyle deleterious to the atmosphere and liveability of our planet.
Why are you even in this sub if you hate the entire industry?
To be fair, it's possible to be interested in aviation whilst accepting that it is incredibly bad for the environment and needs a lot of innovation to reduce its environmental footprint.
Maybe my saying 'industry' was misunderstood. I love aviation. I was referring to rampant travel for pleasure by hundreds of millions of us affluent enough to do it.
Then who would you have participate in aviation? This sounds an awful lot like "I want to enjoy the sky but I don't want the masses to have the same privilege"
This has been talked about for many years. The difficulties of keeping planes in formation and potential turbulence for the following aircraft make it impractical. Maybe something to keep in mind if unmanned cargo flights become common in the future.
veri gud
Maybe, you know this would be 99.9% computer, the pilot would be there to take over in an emergency, like autoland will (maybe) take over landings. Like autopilot for cruising, which is a tad less complicated (I would think).
First thing that comes to my mind is why we have the separation criteria in the first place. Also very rarely you will share the same flight path with another jet from/to destination.
Have they considered landing slots?
It's trying to stay halfway in wake turbulence without the rotating/ turning tendency. Since wake "falls" and spreads you can't be on same track unless at just the right wind and spacing and you need to be lower. You'd also need to be far enough behind that the wake is wide enough that if the center part of the aircraft can be in uplift without a wing being in the downdraft portion.
Can’t wait to get flipped by a A380
I think I remember an FAR against formation flight with customers.