At Melbourne Airport today a far-reaching Australian invention, which could unclog crowded airports worldwide, is being reviewed in a closed session attended by airlines, airport owners and aviation authorities.

But will it have a similar fate to the “black box” flight recorders invented by David Warren, who died last week, and fall on barren ground in this country and become yet another involuntary export of Australian genius to shrewder foreign investors?

For more than eight years the privately Australian-owned Sondei Group has been working on its patented aircraft wake and wind-shear mapping technology.

It has been in trial operation at Melbourne’s main airport at Tullamarine since early 2008.

It uses acoustic techniques to measure in high definition the often severe, chaotic and fast-moving cells of air turbulence caused by the wake of passing aircraft, and by nature, in the form of sudden downdrafts or micro-bursts.

It has been providing real time images of the meteorological and man-made micro-climatic conditions inside and near the airport from ground level to 500 metres up, giving safety authorities their first accurate measures of transient forces that are blamed for the deaths of many hundreds of people in a string of crashes throughout the jet age.

Until recently, its only serious competition was a laser-based LIDAR system under development by Lockheed Martin in the US. However, a US government study now says LIDAR cannot adequately measure the risk, leaving Sondei’s technology as the only deployable solution for aviation.

Both companies are also chasing the application of their processes by wind farming companies, claiming they can  provide accuracy in measuring the efficiency with which the turbines harvest wind energy.

Andrew Martin, the chief scientist at Sondei, says that  given the static availability of major new airports and other factors, “closer spaced aircraft movements are the primary key to unlocking the terminal area bottleneck”.

“If you can see the severe wake turbulence and wind shear events in real time and in high definition, you advance both safety and efficiency of airports,” he says.

Martin says the application of Sondei’s process, and its integration with other new navigation technology (know to the aerospace geeks as ADS-B and RNP) can render safe the average spacing of airliners of (say) 50 seconds between movements on runways where the usual spacing limit is about 90 seconds.

Of course, this won’t make Sydney Airport more productive, as it is politically limited for eternity by a curfew and movement caps, but it would make it much safer when wild weather threatens. There are about three incidents a year in which passenger jets report encounters with wind shear at Australia’s biggest airport or are ordered to go around until an obvious cell of instability dissipates.

And at many cities such as the already congested London Heathrow and San Francisco airports, as well as Melbourne and Brisbane, the system could open the way more to serving more traffic without extra runways.

That’s probably another reason why jet noise activists might resist the technology being used in Australia.