What happens to airliners in a hurricane?

[reverserunlocked]

Last night, I watched a rather graphic documentary on the Discovery Channel about Hurricanes.

As we don't get too many hurricanes here in North Somerset (no, really we don't) I was wondering how you might stop stationary aircraft taking off on high winds.

Some of the hurricanes that hit Asia can reach up to 300 kph and of course I had to try an experiment on MS Flightsim to see what happens because I hope I'll never get the chance to do it for real in my PA28.

I tried the 747-400 with engines idling and if you point the nose into the wind, dial in 200 kts on the wind strength it goes up like a rocket. In fact it was quite easy to 'land' it again, as long as you put the power on to overcome the wind. A groundspeed of nil versus an AIS of 200 kts is rather weird.

Have there been any instances of airliners 'taking off' in extreme
winds? I found that pointing the elevators down and extending the spoilers helped. Or do you trundle the a/c into the hangar asap?

[TwoDogs]

In this part of the world (HK) they tend to try to fly them to an airport in the region that is not going to get hit by the taifun. B4 the MD11 went t!ts up a coupla years ago ops continued as normal, as far as practical, thesedays they seem to divert at the merest sniff of a taifun.

[ironbutt57]

Same thing that happens to your house....it gets moved or ruined.......

[Roadtrip]

They are flown out of harms way. Years ago in the air force, unairworthy KC-135 that had to sit out typhoons in SE asia, were manned engines running and taxied as necessary to keep the nose in the wind, elevator presumably down, spoiler up to kill lift. Luckily I never had to do that.

[Jay Dubbya]

I seem to recall a B727 almost had an unauthorised airbourne excursion at EMA a short while ago....Strong winds hit most of the UK one winter night, and staff at EMA the next morning found a B727-200F sitting on it's backside with it's nose in the air. Still, you can't argue with the law of physics...

A/c get damaged in less strong winds too - though it is usually minor. I know of a least two incidents at BHX when ground equipment has been blown into an aircraft...