Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Crosswind Landing

This little item shows the Boeing factory determining the demonstrated crosswind landing limits on the 777 and the 747SP. The engineers make educated guesses, but then the test crews have to go actually prove the numbers. They sneak off to Brazil to do these tests at a certain remote BAF airbase famous for its continual atrocious crosswinds...Should the gear sideloads be excessive and fold one up, there is nobody there to take nasty pix for the Airbus guys to wave around in the press. This is some good piloting in getting these planes down. It comes close to "incredible".... tire change anybody????
If you haven't seen these it's pretty amazing to watch planes of this size crab walking in on a landing.
Note the rudder action on landing.

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