One AirBus driver shows us how a crosswind landing isn’t done.
This is why NAVSEA provided your really flexible airstrips with a pair of rudders.
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35 comments to Putting on a clinic |
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okay, you pilots have a better collective eye for this sort of thing than i do, so explain this:
what did this pilot do differently than all the examples from the video Lex posted a few months ago? that is, what should he have done?
A- Change runways if possible
B- wing down, top rudder, keep power up is all I can offer
C-After B- if at the stops? Wave off- max power, let it out slow…..
First article I saw on this this AM. The last line is a hoot. Plus I don’t think there was 155 kt wind at the field (at least I hope not…):
“German aviation authorities have praised the pilot of a jet that came within a split second of crashing during a violent storm.
Experts said the powerful storm system “Emma” almost caused all 137 people aboard an Airbus A320 plane to lose their lives in the near-disaster they described as “unprecedented” in the country’s aviation history.
Powerful 155 mph winds battered the Lufthansa jet from Munich on its approach on Saturday into Hamburg airport.
The first attempt to land was aborted as a wing tip brushed the ground and the pilot fought to keep control of his aircraft.
He was forced to climb, circle and come in again with passengers told to brace themselves for a bumpy landing.
“Those few seconds were indescribable,” one passenger told German television station N-TV after arriving safely on the ground.
A spokesman for Lufthansa said some of the passengers were badly shaken.
“Many did not handle it well,” said Wolfgang Weber.
“Some were near tears.”
A spokesman for the organization German Flight Safety, Axel Raab, said that the attempted landing was more dramatic than any incident he could recall in German domestic aviation history.
“It’s extreme – I haven’t yet seen anything like that at a German airport,” said Raab. “The pilot was a real hero.”
———————-
b2
From the same site:
X-wind landings: yur doin it right.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5fc_1189993936
Silly boyz and their flying machines…
…Wonders if ‘change underwear’ is in boldface on the post-landing checklist.
Mike
Funny bus fact – the FBW interprets stick displacement as a roll rate input. Hold the rudder and put in a little opposite stick and it’ll just keep rolling.
b2, I don’t know about A320s, but in the Hornet the flight control computers got crabby if you tried to execute a wing-down, top-rudder crosswind landing. The recommended technique was to crab into the wind and take out half the crab just prior to landing – sort of like the guys are doing in Blackhawk’s link.
It seems to me that what might have occured is that when the pilot of the A320 tried to align his fuselage with the runway, the forward going wing generated sufficient lift as contrasted to the “backward” going wing as to set up a left roll moment. Might even have been the case that as that wing rose there was a sail effect which made it worse.
It’s the kind of stuff you don’t much worry about when your bird only has a 40′ wingspan.
Lex’s discussion of dihedral effect is right on. I would add that the right to left crosswind helped a bit by getting under the upwind wing. Especially if there was an unexpected gust loading.
I was initially inclined (like all pilots with their feet firmly on the ground) to criticize the pilot in this case, but then I considered that he had to have 1500 hours just for the ATP and probably double that to get in the left seat at Lufthansa. Methinks it actually might have been a gnarly, gusty crosswind.
FWIW, I was told by a test pilot that the heavies don’t have enough rudder to be able to slip real well, so they have to crab. Also, slipping tends to upset the drink carts and passengers’ stomachs, so it’s somewhat discouraged for ‘bus drivers.
Made me think of the “use superior headwork to avoid the use of superior airwork” saying. Man, I would have been pissed off if I had been a passenger on that plane.
I seem to recall a video of an American pilot that was attempting to land at what I think was Long Beach Airport in California, and with severe crosswinds he almost did the same thing as the Lufthansa pilot. Anyone else remember that incident?
What’s really spooky is that once the wing scratched the ground, the decision to “Go Around” was made. Granted he looked to have been off the left side of the runway and pretty much in the whipple-wills at that point, but decision to revisit positive VDI on a possibly structurally compromised wing, took some ONIONS!
Could very easily ended up as the primary cause of the catastrophe had that plane augured in. I’d like to see the damage to that tip.
this is Germany.
take the train.
From a non-pilot: So, why not go to an alternate airport? That crosswind was, from the way the plane acted based on the video, beyond bad. As a professional passenger, I would have been happy to survive and VERY angry that I had been put in that situation.
There is either video or at least still footage of the damaged wingtip on LiveLeak.
I rode a 757 into Newark in a really stiff 90 deg. crosswind about 10 years ago. Had a window seat in the back and could tell by the crab on approach the crosswind was bad, but not a bad as this video. I think it was 35-40 knots when I checked weather later that day.
He did the top rudder and opposite airleron as he flared- plane straightened out but had a lot of bank for that close to the ground. He set it down on one mainmount, then the other – almost no side drift. I was impressed.
Maybe the Boeing flight software was a little more friendly to such maneuvers back in those days.
“Many did not handle it well,” said Wolfgang Weber.
Oh, Lufthansa’s tossing out the compensation prizes right and left at this point, I imagine.
In that Hamburg airport incident involving high winds, I don”t know what the pilot thought he was doing. If you cut power at the moment of touch down, the plane, especially one the size of his, will settle and land despite the winds. He appears (from the video) to have hesitated and not cut power when he was supposed to. That would explain what you see in the video (the wing hitting the ground, that sort of thing).
Well, if that says something good for the durability of the beast (since the airline says that damage was minimal), perhaps the USAF is getting a good tanker then…
There was a pilot doing an interview on Fox earlier, and he stated that the upper limit for a crosswind landing is around 75 knots, and that German plane was trying to land with a 150+ crosswind??
I’m current on a 767ER and wing down top rudder works like a charm up to Boeing’s Crosswind limit and there are no surprises at touchdown. I think this poor guy wasn’t ready for the dramatic aerodynamic changes when he stomped that rudder to straighten the nose. In winds like that you need to keep flying even though the mainmounts are on the ground.
For his sake, I hope the investagtion board will have some compassion for him.
Well, there must be some mistake there. 150 kt winds are force 5 hurricane strength, which pretty much elimates the cell phone video factor at the approach end.
Was having a pleasant breakfast in south Stuttgart on Samstag (Saturday) when we caught Emma’s edge. It was raining during the ordering, blowing rain 30-40 degrees shy of horizontal by eggs and hailing/snowing as I shoved the last bit o’ bacon around the plate. We stuck around for an extra round of coffee, needless to say. On bakery departure, my 2-yr-old would’ve gone sailing into the street had I not snagged her by the scruff…narsty day…and night. I don’t think there was what you’d call a ’suitable’ divert, given the shifting winds; Tunisia perhaps. Just one of those days you wish metro was ahead of you signing for a jet. Nein danke!
Absolute nonsense. That was no 150+ crosswind.
The METAR for that approach (rwy 23) was Wind 290 28knots, gusts 48 knots, temporary 290/35/55.
The gusts bring t that above the official A320 certified safe X-wind landing maxima. If some of the souls on board had died, insurance companies wouldn’t have paid a cent.
There is only one thing a pilot should do when attempting to land in unsafe wind conditions….that is, Not Land unless you have no other options. Here are common options: divert to a different runway or airports with better conditions or wait for conditions to improve. Bottom line is do not attempt a landing in wind condition that are beyond the capabilities of the aircraft you are flying. Period.
That German pilot is lucky he doesn’t work for a US airline otherwise the FAA would pull his ticket and he would be out of a job. The decision to land when the winds are beyond the capacity of the airplane is complete negligence on the part of a pilot. I’ve yet to read a report on what the winds were at the time, but every airport has a multitude of weather equipment who’s data is feed to the pilot via the controller. The pilot should have been completely aware of the wind situation and I doubt the gust that hit the plane on short and final was out of the ordinary for the conditions at the time of approach. I’ve watched the video at least six times and it’s looks like the plane is at its maximum cross wind capacity well before it crosses the runway threshold. I suspect that the cross wind component was at a minimum of 30-40 knots and gust were likely occurring that were in excess of 50 knots, making this a unsafe situation that the pilot decided to pursue all the way down to the runway before executing a go around once he hit the runway. Further, not only did this pilot try this once, but twice. Thank god he made it the second time. According to what I’ve read, other airports were closed for peroids of time on Saturday so why do you think they would close? This pilot has not learned the most import skill in flying, JUDGEMENT, JUDGEMENT, JUDGEMENT!!!
Agreed that 150+ winds would knock just about anything/anyone over. Is it possible they are confusing mph with kph? The UK Mirror is reporting it as 155 mph. Reduce that to kph and you have something like 90mph.
The conversy over wind is simple. There is absolutely no way there were 155 mph winds at the time of landing because that is Cat 5 Hurricane force winds and a person can not stand up in winds greater than around 60 miles an hour. It’s unlikely that the person who shot the video could have had done so unless sustain winds were well below 70 mph.
The other issue is that there is a difference between sustain wind and gusts. Sometimes News Agencies will report the highest gust of wind recorded in the area because they don’t know any bettter. This could mere be one gust of wind.
I suspect that sustained winds were in 35-60 knots range with gusts. This is very strong wind, but wind that you can still stand up in. I’m not totally sure exactly what limits of operations are for most US airports but I think they are somewhere in the 60 -80kts range regardless if the wind happens to be blownin directly down the runway in use.
Just some tidbits from the German press that somebody might make sense of:
a.) Hamburg airport was not closed, in fact several jets landed before more safely, including e.g. a smaller Cessna Citation. There were however strong gusts of wind.
b.) Hamburg airport has two airstrips, 23 and 33. The pilot was offerred both, 33 having less cross-wind. He choose 23. The suspicion is he did that because that one has an automatic electronic guidance system.
c.) This is (unconfirmed) from some German aviation forum: Airbus and Lufthanse seem to offer conflicting procedures for cross-wind landing. The one says do not reduce crab before touchdown and do so on main wheels only, while the other suggest to0 reduce crab shortly before touchdown and to flare.
As far as I understand that forum, wing-down is not recommended (or cleared) for the A320.
At 155 kts in that configuration heda (sheda?) been going backwards! I’ll bet they meant to say 55 kts…I can see gusts up that high!
re technique- Well Lex I was just keeping it K.I.S.S. for ol’Don. Computers just do that old trick faster than the pilote can I think! How else is something gonna stay straight with all that crosswind. Plus it’s all I kin member! Seemed to work once or twice! ?? is taking it out right and keeping it all straight. I can feel it but I can’t describe it. Nose would know the ‘ficial version for heavies.
As Stevie says waving off or going somewhere’s else was a better idea!
Gotta agree wid da Enswign “Methinks it actually might have been a gnarly, gusty crosswind.” Or Shoot happens. Hang on folks maybe that pilot is a hero!
b2
I just remember landing in Buenos Aires on a flight from Manaus, Brazil, in a Hawker 800, in a raging thunderstorm. Given the fuel constraints, diverting was not an option. We held our breaths all the way down, but when it came time to flare and cut power, the plane settled like there was no wind at all.
Ken,
This was Ontario Airport in southern California. The Germany one outshines this, but both are spectacular.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=boX4psjhIpc&feature=related
I’m curious what the conditions were and curious if the crew was in the safe X-wind limits of the aircraft. Well at least once the pilot was in over their head they didn’t keep digging and recovered.
I don’t get it. My old man’s Citabria never had any problems like that in a cross wind. :p
Too many discussions of aero theory. Made me think abut my struggle with aero in pre-flight. I think I’m gonna be sick. Either that or have another glass of gin.
xairboss, just make sure it’s Bombay Sapphire
Byron Audler -(this is off subject but made me laugh) I am not a big drinker to begin with.I have a HUGE 1.75 liter of the Sapphire not even used. LOL! I mistakenly bought it for a martini recipe I liked at a particular restaurant. Thinking all martini’s are made with Gin & keeping in mind that Martini’s have a larger alcohol content in comparison to say, a mixed drink,I bought the big bottle at a discount. Come to find out the Extra dirty Martini I really liked was a vodka recipe. Problem is I don’t particularly like Gin.
Xairboss have a seat, I’ll pour!
Got a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and no place to put it?
I’m yer huckleberry
Some companies have procedures that require you to take a runway with a precision approach even in visual conditions. If the captain was blindly following those rules, then he is a dumkopf.
My company limits our A319/320 fleet to a 29 knot crosswind component, Airbus demonstrated limit is a bit higher. Looking at METAR info on some other sites, looks like steady state xwind was in mid 30’s and Max gust was 42 knots (crosswind component). For the record, most operators don’t consider gusts, just the steady state wind in limitations.
As far as Blackhawk’s link above, those made me cringe. Landing gear ain’t made for side loads like that. Never seen anyone land with that much crab in.
On the 320, you fly the crab (point the nose into the wind and fly the runway course to landing) and then kick it out with rudder in the flare. When kicking it out, you must add aileron into the wind to keep the upwind wing from lifting. Secret Asia Man (love that name BTW!) is correct, normally lateral stick input commands a roll rate, however, below about 50′ AGL the control laws change and I think it goes into a direct correlation. Trying to get the exact numbers.
Ugly.
N
Sgt Schultze (You Dumbkoff!) was actually in the left seat. After he left Stalag 13 he went to work for Lufthansa! He is a buddy of Snake’s, along with Genie.
I know it appeared to be clear air but that jet may have faced full micro or at least mini-micro burst, too.
b2