Inappropriate attribution of irresponsibility
asva,
I don't think you will find much sympathy here for your view that, because there was a storm warning for much of northern Europe, then what happened at Hamburg was foreseeable and therefore the pilots were irresponsible.
Reasons are these.
Forecasts are just that. Nobody goes flying when the weather is clearly impossible. Many crews judged that the weather was not clearly impossible. And they were right. Of the hundreds or even thousands of flights which were completed successfully during that stormy weather period, this was the only one which appeared to have control difficulties. If this crew was irresponsible simply because of the weather forecast, then so were each and every other one of those crews who flew. Why single out the PF of this flight in particular?
Second, you suggest that hitting a strong gust of wind exactly at the point of touchdown is "hardly an unforeseeable event". I disagree strongly. I think the chances of that happening exactly at that point are very small indeed.
Here is a comparison. I was sitting in my house during the storm "Cyril" last year (actually, "Kyril", because it's the Germans who name storms), under the one ridge line which extends into the north German plain and which thus disturbs the weather around it, hoping desperately that most of my roof would still be there. During the hours of that storm, tiles came off my neighbors house just once, in one gust. They hit the middle of the road and shattered - and 5 seconds later a car came by (idiots to be driving around in that!). It happened just once. So, given that the heavy part of the storm could be predicted for a period of, say, 8 hours, what are the chances that, as you drive by, the tiles will crash down on your car? Well, *if* a gust hits the house strong enough to take a tile off (and it hit my neighbor's; not mine) and a tile comes off, then two seconds might be a conservative time window for a given passing car, and the chances of it happening exactly as a car passes is about one in 14,400. So now we must multiply this figure by the chances that a strong-enough gust will actually strike a given neighbor's house. I dunno; there are a couple hundred houses around here in three different groups, and I know of two that lost tiles (both my neighbors). So let's say one in a hundred. So the chances appear to have been about one in 1.44 million of getting hit by a tile while out driving around here. That is one thousand times smaller than the chances of dying on the roads in Germany in any one year. When you consider that there are about one thousand eight-hour periods in a year, you will see that, even during that "storm of the century", when everybody was warned to stay indoors and (around here) was legally barred from walking in the woods for two weeks afterwards, your chances of getting hit by falling roof tiles in your car were about equal to your chances of dying in a road accident on a normal day while going shopping. Which is a chance that people take every day, many times, without worrying about it. Even though we were astounded that someone was driving around at the height of Cyril, apparently he was only doubling his chances of dying through driving his car anyway.
So, now, you do the calculations for Emma, a far weaker storm, and the landings of all of those airplanes at all of those airports all over Europe, and let us know what you come up with. (Please feel free to post your results in Italian if you wish.)
PBL