Our office building is located in the vicinity of an airport. When a plane departs and passes overhead, the building sways. Anyone knows what aircraft-related phenomenon/phenomena (turbulence, shock wave) is responsible for this behavior?
Cheers,
quasar
My guess is wake turbulence. It spirals off the wingtips and will usually float down and away from the plane. I think your building is getting hit by one of the vortexes.
I don’t buy the vortices argument. I assume that the plane can’t be that close to the building. If it sways, it must be pretty tall, and an airplane wouldn’t get close at all to a tall building.
A vortex drifts along slowly, and by the time it would reach a building, it would largely be dissipated, plus it would be at a later time that you wouldn’t associate with the plane’s passing.
I think it’s either that you notice the swaying more when a plane passes (the full moon effect), or that the swaying itself is imaginary.
You’re probably right, CurtC. I was scope-locked on assuming the swaying was actually happening (and happening only when a plane passes), so it was the only thing that made sense to me. I hadn’t considered your approach.
It really sways; others have felt it. And it is directly related to a plane passing by; it is felt every time the roar of a plane’s engine is heard (similar to Joe Pesci’s apartament shaking when the train passed by in “My cousin Vinny.”
As to the building, it is actually not tall at all–only 4 floors.
Cheers,
quasar
How close are the planes coming to your building? Are you right at the end of the runway or are the planes a couple thousand of feet up by the time they pass overhead? Also, what kind of planes are we talking about here, relatively small jets or much bigger 747’s and 777’s?
So it shakes? That’s different from swaying. I don’t think a 4-story building could sway. The plane’s engines produce a lot of low frequency sound energy that shakes the building.
Oh, wake turbulence certainly could shake a building - if the plane was big enough. After all, something like a 747 or 757 has the size and mass of a small building, fully loaded weighs hundreds of thousands of pounds, and has to push a large mass of air down and back to stay up and go forward. This results in some very powerful vortices.
The questions are - how big is the plane? How ridgid is the building structure? How close are the two together?
A location right next to an airport, or directly under approach and departure paths, will result in airplanes coming much closer to buildings than they ordinarially would under other circumstances.
Other factors at work might be wind, and human perceptions.
What about “jet wash”?
Jet wash = wake turbulence