A Near Crosswind Disaster

Here's some amazing footage of a landing attempt and near crash of an Airbus A-320 in Germany. There was a fierce crosswind thanks to a tropical storm at the time and I think when the pilot watches this video he'll realize that he should have started his go-around a lot sooner:



In the small planes I used to fly I would handle a crosswind by dipping a wing into the wind which would allow me to keep the fuselage relatively aligned with the runway. I could do that because I was flying high wing Cessnas that have plenty of clearance below the wing to accomodate a wing low landing.

You can't do that in a commercial jet with large engines hanging below the wing. They have to "crab" the landing and hope they can straighten it out once the wheels touch. Each aircraft has maximum crosswind tolerances that can't be exceeded without damaging the aircraft. When you look at a twin-engine passenger jet with engines under the wings you'll notice that the bottom of the engine nacelles are flatter then the rest of the nacelle which is more rounded. They're designed that way for a little extra ground clearance.

The guy in the above video was pretty clearly over those tolerances and nearly wiped the whole thing out.

You may remember this footage of another A-320 that crashed during an early demonstration flight when the automated flight control system decided to override the pilots and tried to land the plane even though the pilots didn't want to do that (especially in the trees). Hopefully they've fixed that.

By the way, the company that builds the planes in both of these videos is the same company that was just given a $40 billion dollar contract to build the new tanker fleet for the Air Force...instead of Boeing.