[rudy45]

I don’t understand—did he first touch down, then take off again? What happened after that?

[GeorgiaDawg32]

he circled and landed on his second attempt..

[Moose4]

He was attempting to land with a high wind blowing in from the right side of the airplane, so in order to compensate for that, the pilot flies the airplane with the nose pointed a bit into the wind, and the plane literally flies a little sideways. Just before touching down, the pilot uses the rudders to swing the nose back around straight, so that the landing gear doesn’t have a lot of side stress placed on it. It looks like that when the pilot moved the nose over, the plane got hit by a hard gust that rolled it over and caused the left wingtip to hit the runway.

Once the crew realized (to their credit, very quickly) that things were bad, they went to full power and did a “go around”. It’s a good thing they did, because otherwise they could’ve ended up completely off the runway, probably with the landing gear torn off once they hit the soft grass, and at best you’re looking at an emergency evacuation with a few minor injuries and a badly damaged or totalled airplane (see the British Airways 777 in London earlier this year).

The question will now be, why did the pilot attempt the landing. It’s possible that the weather information given to him by the airport (Hamburg, Germany, btw) stated that the winds were within the allowable maximum crosswind limit for an A320, so he went ahead with the approach.

}:-)4

[A CA Guy]

He came in tilted sideways a bit against the wind and then he tried to land.
He was not hitting the tires straight on, so he went down on the left wheel first alone. It started to skid because the weight was all on one wheel. Then it slid the other way and he got air born before it crashed.

It was like you or I trying to land a glider with a 40 MPH cross wind.