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
Wind readings, for the most part, are taken 10ft off the ground...the height of the old cockpits.
Does anybody know if there are readings from higher airport locations?
Structures upwind of the runway can cause strange rotors, especially in gusty conditions. I have two high-wind parachute jumps which were scary as hell. As I approached the ground the winds kept changing in speed, direction and character. Between my surfing the turbulence and the directional changes, I was toggling all the way into my bounce. No fun; but good beer stories afterwards.