Tag Archives: airports

“I could never handle crosswinds,” Pt II

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Just as last week I featured a series of harrowing crosswind landings of commercial aircraft at Dusseldorf Airport in Deutschland, here I present something quite equally harrowing for the five hundred persons inside that thin aluminum tube.

The crosswind landing of an Emirates Airbus A380-800 at, again, Dusseldorf.

Remember folks, the pilot in an A380 doesn’t have the advantage of a yoke to grasp as on a Boeing; he’s holding your life in his left hand via a side joystick.  Even worse if he’s right-handed.  Plus, the pilot landed late on a soaked runway, hence the clouds of mist from the thrust reversers.

BZ

 

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“I could never handle crosswinds”

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I remember a pilot telling that to my father many years ago, when I was very young.  He and my father were taking me up in some kind of an old over-wing single engine aircraft with a radial engine; that much I also remember.  The plane was blue, and I got to “fly” it for a minute or so, trying hard just to keep it level.

How’d you like to be a passenger in a plane whose pilot is attempting to land here, in these kinds of crosswinds?

Ultimately that’s a lot of Old School “stick and rudder” flying, as they say.

BZ

 

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