PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Landings in gusty conditions
View Single Post
Old 7th Nov 2007, 19:13
  #19 (permalink)  
IO540
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: EuroGA.org
Posts: 13,787
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
It's a fact of life that when it's windy it is more difficult to fly a stabilised approach and it's difficult to do the last bit too. One just has to be quite proactive with the controls - often this looks alarming to passengers who are used to you holding the yoke with two fingers. Crucially one must maintain the "glideslope" while very regularly checking the airspeed, and if it starts to change away from the target then the engine power must be quickly adjusted - all the while one is using the controls to keep the plane on the line of the approach (laterally and vertically).

Usually, the last few feet are OK because there is much less wind ON the runway than say 20 yards up.

It also helps (in terms of pilot workload) to be correctly trimmed for the landing configuration airspeed when still high up (shortly after base to final turn i.e. about 1000ft AGL) because it tends to not be too bumpy up there. Then, when it gets rougher as one descends further, there isn't any need to fiddle with the trim, and in any case it would be a waste of time because one can't trim when the thing is going all over the place.

And the more wind there is, even if straight down the runway, the more wind shear there will be. So one has to watch the airspeed extra carefully. I personally don't "add extra" for this but then I fly a 250HP plane which has loads of power. In a Warrior, I would be wary of landing with say a 40kt wind because at 1000ft it is likely to be 70kt which is 30kt of total wind shear; in fact more because the wind is measured at the top of a 10m pole and there will be considerable additional wind shear in those last 10m of height. In such a case is is going to see 40kt of airspeed gradually disappear between starting the final and touching down. In such a case one should probably add 10-20kt to the approach speed.

I've done about 700 landings to date (7 years, 850hrs TT). Only one go-around so far due to bad technique. So whatever I do seems to work for me.
IO540 is offline