 B-52 crosswind landing |
Discussed here.
Posted on 10/08/2017 8:04:00 AM PDT by rktman
Millions of people have been viewing and forwarding or posting an alarming-looking video (embedded below) of a giant A 380 airliner landing in heavy crosswinds at Dusseldorf. It’s scary-fun, but actually nothing unique to the Airbus or all that unusual. There is an entire genre of crosswind landings on YouTube. But owing to size, it is impressive.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The one in the picture looks more than 15 degrees.
Even so we have had some exciting times trying to get back on the ground on certain occasions. We have many friends who won't fly in here at all because of the occasional bumpiness and the tall Bonneville power lines on one end and the trees on the other.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from the airliner... we have several hang gliders and an ultralight airplane called a Skypup. The Skypup is extremely easy to fly and very well mannered as well, but it is a tail-dragger with no ailerons. The stall speed is only 25mph. This means that when you land in a crosswind you sometimes come in at what appears to be a ridiculous crab angle. In this situation you have do a “wheel landing” (as opposed to a 3 point) where the mains (the front two wheels) contact the ground first and then you make a quick correction. Most of the time you still end up doing a couple unintended S turns before you get things under control, but I have never actually ground looped the Skypup when landing.
My Skypup is a little nose heavy however and when trying to taxi to the end of the runway to take off in stronger winds a gust will sometimes cause it to weathervane. (Do a quick unintended 180 degree turn) I will then cut the engine and then walk it to the end of the runway like a wheel barrow holding it by the propeller and pushing down so that the tailwheel is off the ground. When I get to the end of the runway I give the rope starter a quick pull, hop in and take off.
In windy conditions like that the Skypup leaps into the air in less than 50 feet. And when you get it above the tree line the wind is often higher than its stall speed of 25 mph. So for the amusement of my friends I will sometimes fly up past the end of the runway crab across the crosswind portion of the landing pattern. Slow up and let the wind carry me backwards on downwind then crab across the base portion of the landing pattern and then descend vertically onto the numbers or wherever I want to come down.
Despite the dangerous sounding description... it is really not nearly as bad as it sounds. I came to it from a hang gliding background where we were always hoping for windy conditions in the mountains so that we could soar all day. Flying the Skypup is much more pedestrian than jumping off a cliff into gusty mountain air. My Skypup weighs only 230 pounds and was built from plans using a single cylinder 28HP Rotax 277 snowmobile engine. The airframe is made mostly out of Styrofoam insulation from Home Depot. There are no known fatalities in the design despite the plans being available since 1982. Wikipedia claims only 350 have been built but I believe that the number is larger.
The 380 is one UGLY airplane!
The 380 is one UGLY airplane!
The vertical tail rudder on that beast looks like something you’d see on a large sailing yacht.
Try flying into San Diego.....Planes come down like a duck on a pond.
When leaving the airport after one of my arrivals I shot a picture of a bright orange Braniff 747 passing so close over me...and over the nearby apartment blocks...that I could almost reach up and grab the gear (which,obviously,was down at the time).
Another airport,one which I've never visited,is featured in many youtube videos:Princess Julianna Airport in Saint Martin.Watching 747s fly 75 feet over the beach and then land would have been,to me at least,worth a trip there.But 747s don't fly there anymore.It would be a hoot if an airline started flying 380s there!
It looks like a grinder with wings.
LOL, reminds me of the Sully movie where all the other pilots crash on simulator. My son was about 10 or 11 when the Air Force brought a bunch of simulators in a trailer for recruiting. I still have his ID card. Anyway, he nailed the mission and the recruiters told him how good he was (of course). I flew in circles.
This plane has steerable dual-bicycle gear which allows the crew to point the gear along the runway while the fuselage is "crabbed" up to 20* off the runway centerline. AFAIK the gear are slaved to the ILS; you dial in the OBI to a course and the gear will point that way even if the aircraft points differently.The reason this was done is primarily due to the design of the rest of the aircraft. It's a very "dense" design, cramming a lot of weight into a very small package, requiring massive wings and tail just to keep the thing under control at altitude. These surfaces then become huge sails at lower altitudes, and with the high, anhedraled wing arrangement on a relatively low fueselage, there's not much room for error. B-52 pilots often say you have to fly 2 seconds ahead of the plane, it's that slow to react to pilot input. So, classic "de-crabbing" techniques involving a hard rudder with counter-aileron just aren't going to work with a BUFF. You have to land crabbed and correct after touchdown, and on a dry runway that isn't a good idea either with an aircraft of this size.
Modern airliners, for their size, are much easier to maneuver on the whole than the BUFF. Really big ones, like the 747, actually have steerable main gear as well, but AFAIK the 747's mains can only be actively steered on the ground, and because they counter-steer to the nose gear (helps bring the tail around corners; imagine driving something about 4 times longer than an 18-wheeler) they would actually be pointed further off the runway line when de-crabbing.
Hard to say. It is all what you are accustomed to. I am sure there are lots of Piper Cub pilots who have flown backwards as well. We used to fly our hang gliders backwards all of the time. I have a 1st generation double surface hang glider, a UP Comet, and a second generation Wills Wing Attack Duck. They are more difficult to land than modern double surface hang gliders because the stall speed is 25mph just like the Skypup.
I remember flying one time flying the Attack Duck when the wind was gusting up to 50 mph or so. The lift was terrific so I ended up several thousand feet above the launch area. I inadvertently let myself be blown backwards several miles from the landing area. Fortunately, the Attack Duck was capable of diving up to above 70 mph, but it was still a struggle to get back to the landing area.
The biggest problem I can see with the paragliders that seem to be more popular than hang gliders these days, is that most of them can't go more than 15 or 20 mph. If the wind gets higher than that you cannot make it to your landing area. One of my friends ended up stuck and injured in the top of a tall fir tree for hours. If he hadn't had a good VHF radio, who knows when he would have been found. I flew a paraglider with him a couple of times, but all the swinging back and forth to turn combined with the being lurched up and down by turbulence made me air sick each time.
Agree.
Pilot boned it.
I think the distance compression due to the lens zoom also exaggerates the perceived severity of the landing. There is no doubt that it is out of the ordinary, but I don’t know if it was as bad as we think.
I understand your point, but based on my experience, and I’ve been flying since I received my private pilot license at age 17 then flew for the USAF for a career (all total about 45yrs), from my view of the landing, the pilot boned the landing. Regardless of lens compression, the jet was swerving back-and-forth way too much because the pilot did a lot of over-correcting.
Just my opinion off course.
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