Emirates Airbus A380 crosswind landing at Dusseldorf, Germany, October of 2014. Imagine yourself inside that massive inflated sausage. And imagine the stress placed on the huge tail rudder, the horizontal stabilizers, the wing roots and the gear trucks. “Can I get some cleaning solution for the seats in here, please?”
Same aircraft, different vantage point.
And to think: this pilot had to land with some crappy Airbus joystick (instead of a proper two-handed yoke as with Boeing products) — left handed — when odds are that the pilot is right-handed.
Please note a number of factors. These are the three most basic: pitch, roll and yaw.
Facing us, the wind is blowing left-to-right. The aircraft is thusly crabbing right, into the wind.
Note the enormous square footage of the vertical tail rudder and its effects as the pilot attempts to correct the yaw with his feet. Then the hard main carriage strike as the pilot valiantly tries crabbing. The entire main truck system rebounds into the air and yet, simultaneously, the aircraft skews left, then the pilot corrects with rudder to the right — on the verge of an over-correction. Then slightly left again.
And in an Airbus, the pilot — if that’s the person truly in control on this landing — must handle the left-sided joystick with what most persons would call their “weak hand.”
This is the greatest mental paradigm between the two major commercial aircraft manufacturers: Airbus favors the exterior joystick (left configured for the pilot, right configured for the co-pilot), whilst Boeing has continued to support the central vertical yoke at both pilot and co-pilot stations. Or:
1 Airbus = joystick,
2. Boeing = practical two-handed yoke.
In the Airbus, the difference between success and failure can be one trained or non-trained hand.
Which, in my estimation, taken but upon common sense, the Boeing control paradigm succeeds over the Airbus paradigm. When input matters, balanced input matters.
Note the inherent undulations in the runway that, somehow, the pilot must deal with on top of the terrible crosswind weather conditions.
And yet with every “worst case scenario” thrown into the mix except perhaps a tornado, the pilot manages to place the A-380 on terra firma and thrust-reverse the #2 and #3 engines.
Taking all of these factors into consideration, the pilot was in fact the Captain of his soul.
As a passenger, would you not be “shitting Twinkies” in that thin aluminum tube?
Frankly, that was an incredible set of piloting skills on display.
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.
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.
Imagine being a passenger.