High winds landing
 

just seen footage on the dailymail site of a jet landing in high cross winds.....was wondering if they are done manually or on autopilot?
stupid question but there you go.....

Always manually in these sorts of conditions - autopilots are not good at handling strong crosswinds. And it is not a stupid question if you don't know the answer. :p

the A320 that I fly has three wind limitations for autoland: 30,20,10. 30kts headwind,20 crosswind and 10 tailwaind.

Outside of these it is manual landing only...

Cheers

Paolo

The 777 that I fly has limitations for autolands in LVO only. Otherwise it is the aircraft limit.
Does it VERY nicely, as did the 744 before it!

Autoland limit on the 737 is 25 kts head and cross wind component, 10kts tailwind. Manual crosswind limit on dry and wet runways is 40kts. And it's a lot of fun to land in those conditions ;)

Must agree with Jn the 777 autopilot does excellent xwind landings.

Thanks everyone...in fact, after I posted the this, I took a flight from Luxembourg to London on Saturday. It was delayed 1.5 hours due to high winds in London so the captain invited passengers to the cockpit....sat in the Captain's seat and some some pix, including the ultimate selfie:)
Captain said he would perform the landing manually at Heathrow and, in the end, it was a smooth landing though the place was tossed around a bit more than usual.
Love this site :-)

The really interesting question is why is the human better than the autopilot for strong cross-winds?

Generally most pilots would agree that automated flight control is more precise than manual control. Automated height keeping, heading keeping and (normal) landing are all as good as a pilot at the top of their game.

It is, after all, a simple exercise in control law. Simple mathematical rules of input and response which automatic systems can be tuned to do extremely well. In the human of course the mathematics is replaced by "learned response" also known as "experience" and "practice", but it is still basic control law in action.

So why does the automatic system go wrong when it gets a bit gusty? Reaction times for automatics are well fast enough for wind shear and gusts. So there is a strong implication that the human has access to some subtle extra data that the automatics just do not have. But what?

Human beings have senses,eg. sight,sound and touch that allow anticipation of what may happen.
Just a thought...until a computer expert disposes of my theory!!!

Dont Hang Up: The short answer is that pilots can ANTICIPATE whereas autopilot response is REACTIVE.

A good example of this would be the well known shear condition at LGW 26L in certain wind directions caused by large hangers ( the clue here is its nickname:
Freddies Revenge! ) No autopilot could be programmed for this.

Is PIO a problem when landing manually in windy gusty conditions?