PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Head Wind drop off on Landing
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Old 25th Oct 2018, 21:18
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Mark 1
 
Join Date: Aug 2000
Location: S Warwickshire
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A bit of quick and dirty analysis.

Say you are on a stabilised 3° approach at 100 KTAS into a 10 knot headwind with 450 ft/min rate of descent (90 knots ground speed).
At 500' the headwind disappears, so your TAS instantly drops by 10 knots.
To regain that 10 knots you lose some extra height by the formula H=(V1^2-V2^2)/2g. For our case that equates to about 78' excess height loss to be restabilised at 100 KTAS.

So you are now at 422' and 100 knots ground speed and still descending at 450 ft/min so your glide angle has reduced due to the increased ground speed to about 2.7°.
The touchdown point has now moved from 500/Tan(3) to 422/tan(2.7) or 9540' to 8950'.

So the reduced glide angle has not compensated for the height loss required to regain the approach airspeed.

So the answer is 'it depends'. The higher the shear layer, the more likely you are to recover from the height loss without adding power.
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