Pilot nails sideways landing in 40-knot crosswinds at Bristol Airport

Yes, it’s really bad leadership. But those were isolated cases of overzealous middle managers, not upper management philosophy.

Those I know in these companies never feel they need to justify their fuel figures. But they also think fuel economy. They don’t just fill extra because they can. They fill extra because they feel they may need it.
It doesn’t make any sense to me to fill the same amount of fuel on a CAVOK summer day and on a snowy winter day. If someone fills 500kg extra on both those days, I question their logic.

I agree completely. Efficiency comes with experience. If you happen to fly with lots of new-hires like I do, you have to also consider their comfort level. It’s a give and take and can’t be entirely based on the Captain’s comfort level. When I was a new Captain at my current airline I aborted a landing very similar to the video above but where I didn’t do nearly as good a job setting it up and was laterally out of position. To correct would have floated me a thousand feet or more down the runway. So around we went. The next day I wrote an Irregularity Report explaining the go-around. My chief pilot called almost immediately and said, “Hey Eric, great job! Now…never write one of those damn things again about a go-around, OK!?” To take it even further, my company is practically begging us to go around more. Even in a little 737 that’s 2000 pounds plus, wasted. But it is a culture where safety trumps efficiency. Ryan Air may have that culture today. But I am pretty certain that they didn’t have that culture 15 years ago when I was more involved in what other airlines were doing.

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Absolutely! You have to act as a crew, all the time.

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It’s a good thing virtual fuel if free…:slightly_smiling_face:

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I would love to see a Read it / Do it on this. Having one of you talk about crabbing tactics and screenshots in your ride of expertise would be amazing. Can X-Plane do 40 knot winds?

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I’ve landed like this in xplane. Not quite at 40 but ya. I dislike it immensely lol.

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I like leaning on a pedal so far that I’m falling off the chair. I might be doing it wrong though.

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I just scream LEROOOY JENKINNNSSS really loudly and wing it in. Works like a charm for me!

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I tried it with the Flight Factor 757 Professional v2 using Boston’s RWY 27 with the winds out of the north at 40. Extreme situations like this one is something desktop sims don’t seem to do well. The takeoff required full right aileron starting at about 80 knots to prevent a hard roll to the left. IRL you only need about 10 degrees of yoke into the wind (just shy of the point where spoilers begin to deflect). Other than that the takeoff was normal. The touchdown worked out ok but required full aileron as I kicked out the yaw. It IS normal to do that in the real thing not to prevent a downwind roll but to aid in directional control. In the sim, the landing started out normal but a left roll began as I decelerated below about 110 and continued until stop. The playback in VR was pretty funny with the left wing and nacelle dragging and with the left main and nosewheel rolling. Once I switched to 2D it wouldn’t let me playback. So I have no proof of the effort. X-Plane rules but I think blade element theory goes out the window when the air isn’t passing straight along the “blade elements”. If you really want to see it, I can try it again in 2D but honestly I don’t think the sim behaves well enough for it to be an educational exercise.

Edit: I did get it to play back successfully. Not sure how the .sit file would work unless you own the plane. I tried filming the view from the tower (quite funny actually) but couldn’t upload here.

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Thanks @smokinhole ! That’s really interesting to hear how it went. I may try it myself with the MD-80 at KBOS and see how it goes.

Captain Brenda Riepsaame Wassink
https://imgur.com/gallery/RkZ7bwx

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Blade element theory is about dividing a body into smaller elements and do calculations on each element, instead of a mean calculation of the entire body.
This will give you a better approximation.

Nothing wrong with the theory, but it’s no silver bullet. :slight_smile:

The more sub-elements, the greater the range of conditions where it does deliver similar performance to the real thing, at the cost of higher computational complexity and the amount of data needed (for each element, you need a multidimensional lookup table of lift depending on speed, alpha, beta and possibly cross coupling with other flight surfaces).

Oh I’m not trashing what’s under X-Plane’s hood. I don’t understand a lick of it! I just know that sims do most things extremely well, yet struggle when conditions are extraordinary. Crosswinds, slips, snaps, spins, tailslides–basically anything that has the flowing at a big angle to the longitudinal axis–result in very unrealistic behavior. Avoid those situations and you’re golden.

BTW, the photo of the “crosswind captain” above has her in an airplane that is obviously not a 757. 787 maybe?