Abstract: Turbulence in the wake generated by wind flow over buildings or obstacles may produce complex flow patterns in downstream areas. Examples include the recirculating flow and wind deficit areas behind an airport terminal building and their potential impacts on the aircraft landing on nearby runways. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of the wind flow over an airport terminal building was performed in this study of the effect of the building wake on landing aircraft. Under normal meteorological conditions, the studied airport terminal building causes limited effects on landing aircraft because most of the aircraft have already landed before entering the turbulent wake region. By simulating the approach of a tropical cyclone, additional CFD sensitivity tests were performed to study the impacts of building wake under extreme meteorological conditions. It was found that, in a narrow range of prevalent wind directions with wind speeds larger than a certain threshold value, a substantial drop in wind speed (>3.6 m/s) along the glide path of aircraft was observed in the building wake. Our CFD results also showed that under the most critical situation, a drop in wind speed as large as 6.4 m/s occurred right at the touchdown point of landing aircraft on the runway, an effect which may have a significant impact on aircraft operations. This study indicated that a comprehensive analysis of the potential impacts of building wake on aircraft operations should be carried out for airport terminals and associated buildings in airfields to ensure safe aviation operation under all meteorological conditions and to facilitate implementation of precautionary measures.

Key words: Aviation safety, Building aerodynamics, Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), k-ε turbulence model, Tropical cyclone

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