Ooops!
Now this is what you call flying!
YouTube direct - Lufthansa Airbus Wingstrike
Judging by the side-slip, the pilot was getting hit by some really nasty crosswinds and gusts, one of them must have hit the plane just as the wheels were about to make contact with the ground.
Shows why pilots practice touch-and-go’s so much. Kudos to the flight crew!
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As a pilot, there are a couple of things I’d note here:
1. From observation, I would _guess_ (this is not a studied guess) that the cross wind component exceeded the maximum demonstrated cross wind parameter for that airplane.
2. That landing was called a “Kick out”. The principle is this: You point your nose into the wind until just before you touch down. You then kick the rudder to align your nose to the runway, while firmly rolling INTO the wind, planting the upwind wheel on the ground FIRMLY and then bringing the other wheels down. If you watch, the DOWNWIND wheel touched first, with the airplane rolled AWAY from the wind, allowing the airplane to be pushed across the runway. I don’t know if it would have made any difference had it been done properly, but it certainly was done incorrectly. I have performed kick outs quite a few times, they do allow you to land in some pretty severe cross winds.
3.That crew should have long before landing requested an alternate landing place with an alignment more favorable to the prevailing winds and gone there. Proceeding with that landing endangered them and their passengers or cargo or the plane. It showed abysmal judgement - unless that WAS the alternate landing place and all others were worse, which is possible.
Side note - the B-52 bombers wheel trucks could be turned - all three of them - so that the bomber could be landed with the nose NOT aligned with the runway (pointed into the wind) while the wheels ARE aligned with the runway, for just such occasions as this video showed. It allowed the B-52 to operate in conditions that were amazing.
*grins* You know my record with fixed-wing flying, I never got out of the simulator …
Something to do with the number of CFIT incidents I ended up with …
*whistles innocently*