It may seem counterintuitive, but on windy days, aircraft should fly closer together. Those are the plans at Heathrow airport anyway.
The problem is that Heathrow is running at full capacity1. It cannot process more than the 480,000 flights it currently2 handles per year. With flights booked throughout the day, there is no chance to make up for delays later in the morning as there is at quieter airports. And the biggest cause of these delays is wind.
In order to stay safe, airports leave gaps4 of several kilometres between landing5 aircraft. This is because as an aeroplane cuts through the sky it creates a vortex - a trail of churned up air - which is dangerous for other planes to fly through. For a large aircraft like the Boeing A380 the gap3 can be eleven kilometres.
However, planes measure their speed through the air, not over the ground. Therefore, if planes are flying into a headwind, scientists say the gap can be safely reduced. Imagine a plane is flying over the ground at
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