Video here of an A380 during a wild crosswind landing.
Does this plane need any sort of inspection afterward? Do tires need to be replaced? Thinking of American Airlines Flight 587 here…how much can the A380’s vertical stabilizer tolerate?
Video here of an A380 during a wild crosswind landing.
Does this plane need any sort of inspection afterward? Do tires need to be replaced? Thinking of American Airlines Flight 587 here…how much can the A380’s vertical stabilizer tolerate?
There are all sorts of instruments throughout the plane that will indicate any sort of overstress status. If it is determined that anything approached or exceeded limits, per the manual, the plane will be decommissioned for a thorough inspection of the parts in question.
That landing didn’t look that bad, by the way. They said it was a “hard” landing. It might have been by spec, but planes rebounding on landing isn’t terribly abnormal, and while it looked dramatic it probably wasn’t harmful to the plane.
Yeah, while i’m sure that the passengers probably found the whole thing a bit unnerving, and some of them probably lost their lunch, that sort of landing would be very unlikely to cause any trouble at all for the structural integrity of the plane itself.
Those things can cope with far more stress than is ever likely to occur on a routine flight, or even in very stormy and turbulent conditions. Pilot Patrick Smith, who runs the Ask The Pilot website, often observes that turbulence and other events that passengers freak out about barely register with the guys in the cockpit, and certainly pose no threat to the plane itself.
I wouldn’t worry about most of the plane, but it seems like that landing would have put some nasty side loads on the landing gear.
I am not a pilot, but it appears to me that most of the oscillation occurred after the main landing touched down. Did the pilot possibly overcorrect?
The Pprune (pilots’ forum) thread is here.
Looks like the source videos cross wind landings. You can see the plane get pushed, land and then get shoved over again by the wind. Looks like the pilots corrected it nicely. Unpleasant landing for the passengers though.
The touchdown wasn’t that violent, but I was thinking of the post-touchdown swaying, putting rather large side loads on the landing gear, rudder, and vertical stabilizer. No issues likely there either??
It seemed to me all the rudder inputs were late, held way too long and proper attention to and understanding of large mass & momentum were not understood.
Why IMO, tail dragger experience should still be taught from day one in a pilots training. Heavier the better., By that, not a cub but a Beech-18, Beaver and Swift for short coupled experience.
When trying to take a C-170 pilot and check him out in a C-180, understanding the difference in weight and response time to mass in motion was very hard to get across. A C-170 would prollu werck a Beech-18 in good conditions much less cross wind conditions.
In simple terms, lots of input quick, and quickly removed and start stopping the resultant movement of the first input and extreme attention to any slight change is necessary. Weight, can’t ever forget the weight.
Pilot in this example was way behind the plane & seemed to need large direction changes to recognize that a correction was need or needed to be removed or even needing to start the preemptive dance with the rudder.
Just IMO.
On a related topic, what the hell is up with Düsseldorf? This is like the 140th crazy crosswind video I’ve seen from that airport.
Watching some of the testing done on aircraft before they are certified is instructive.
Here is a test stressing the wing. If you saw the wing doing that on a plane you were flying in you’d probably poop yourself.
I also watched a video on a water ingestion test for a new Rolls Royce turbofan engine. I found it impossible to believe the engine could run with that much water going through it but it did just fine despite my beliefs.
Is it just me or does it look to anyone else like the plane is landing vertically (i.e., straight down) at the beginning of the video? I realize that’s not the case, and it’s probably because of the angle from which the camera is positioned, but it looks like it’s just dropping.
The enormous size of the plane helps create that illusion. It is also flying into a very strong headwind so the ground speed is much lower than normal (the air speed remains the same).
That second point can be even more pronounced in smaller aircraft. Strong headwinds can allow planes like Piper Cubs to fly nearly still or even backwards relative to the ground under the right conditions. The plane doesn’t care as long as enough air is flowing across the wings and control surfaces.
Still, the A380 is moving a lot faster than you think - probably still over 100 mph (they can land fairly slowly for such a large plane even with no headwind). It just doesn’t look like it because of the scale. It is obvious that the rudder is still very effective until well after touchdown and that requires a whole lot of air flowing across it to work well at all.
LOL.
That’s an Emirates plane. The airline has among the most exacting standards in the world for its pilots.
The minimum requirements just to be employed as a First Officer include extensive experience on large multi-engine planes, with at least 2000 hours on planes with a Maximum Takeoff Weight of over 20 tonnes, or at least 3000 hours on planes with an MTOW of 10-20 tonnes.
To join the airline as a Captain, the minimum is 7000 hours of total flying time, with at least 3000 hours command time on planes with an MTOW of 50 tonnes or more, including at least 1000 hours of wide-body or long-haul experience (as Captain or First Officer) in the previous 3 years.
But you should definitely send your critique to the pilot. I’m sure that he or she will take your suggestions into account on the next crosswind landing that they have to deal with. And they’ll probably run right out and try to get some tail-dragger experience in.
The extreme telephoto lens makes the plane’s motions seem much more erratic. That also explains why it seems to drop straight down.
I only watched the vid and didn’t read any other online info.
Looks to me like a crappily executed landing in rather difficult conditions. Might’ve blown a tire on the right inboard main gear. The actual touchdown vertical speed didn’t look too high. Certainly not enough to break anything. All the swaying side to side might have been an overstress. I’d certainly expect the airplane needed a hard landing inspection under the maintenance criteria. Whether that’s the work of 2 man-hours or 2 man-weeks I can’t say.
The extreme telephoto lens distorts the crap out of what we’re seeing.
As to Emirates, their standards are about typical for a major airline. Recognizing that few established airlines hire anyone directly to Captain; that’s mostly done at small operators growing quickly. Which Emirates once was, but hasn’t been for 10+ years. Up to a couple years ago they were still growing at a good clip, but not from such a small base that they need to hire directly to the captain position.
The reality of long haul flying is that pilots get very little landing practice. An RJ pilot will land more times in a month than an A380 pilot will land in 2 years.
True enough. A friend of mine flies 747s for QANTAS. He’s in the air for a lot of hours, but his flying schedule, in terms of takeoffs and landings, is tiny compared to, say, a Southwest or Delta domestic pilot.
A few things:
I think GusNSpot is pretty much on the money, it was a bit of a hamfisted landing. Whether it was a bad pilot or a good pilot having a bad day or trainee pilot getting a feel for things we will likely never know and it doesn’t really matter.
LSLGuy, Emirates are taking direct entry captains. A lot of airlines around the world are at the moment, you don’t even need a type rating for some of them.
Yeah, but experience on big planes makes you experienced - ON BIG PLANES.
I’m not suggesting it was a perfect landing, although there are factors that might have affected the landing that are not immediately obvious on the video.
But do you really think—as the post i was responding to suggested—that some practice on a tail-dragger would help an A380 pilot land one of the largest and most technologically sophisticated planes in existence in a heavy crosswind?
I think it would. I’ve never flown an Airbus product. But I have flown fly-by-wire fighters and big Boeings. And taildraggers, lightplanes, lightplane aerobatics, and sailplanes.
There are lots of professional pilots who are airplane steerers. Which works just fine except at the very edges of the envelope. The pilot flying that A380 may have been an excellent stick who was falling asleep after 18 hours in the air with a 3 hour nap 10 hours ago . Or he/she may have been an airplane steerer.
A problem with the automated fancy airplanes is they make the moderately hard stuff trivial and leave the truly hard stuff entirely to the pilot. With the result that pilots become dull knives asked to conduct eye surgery once every year or so.
This pilot was asked to do something hard that day. And he/she did a poor job. Not a disastrous job, so in one sense it met the standard: an accident was successfully avoided. It may have been good enough. But was it good? IMO no.