SBR0510 wrote:
For the laymen, what's a brief (or however long you'd like) way to describe what the pilot is doing here? It's obviously some hugely incredible feat of piloting, but I wonder if I can even really tell what I'm looking at due to POV, distance from camera to subject, etc. The plane almost seems to be hovering at one point.
It is a crosswind landing. Planes fly by having air flow over their wings. To maintain flight for a certain airplane weight and flap configuration, you need a certain speed of air moving over the wings. So idealy you want to landing into a headwind, so that for the same speed of air moving over the wings, you are moving a slightly slower speed over the ground, compared to no wind or a tail wind.
So airports are designed so that the runways run in the direction of the prevailing winds, this is based on some statistics based on the historic winds. Basically they want something like 95% of time the winds are going to be coming in the direction that the runways run, within something like 10 degrees. So some airports, all the runways run north-south or east west. Other airports, like O'Hare have runways running North-South, East-West, Northeast-Southwest, and Northest-Southeast, because the winds come from any direction.
So the airport design covers you 95% of the time (I forget the exact number). But the other 5% of the time the wind can be blowing from some direction other than basically in the direction of the runway. It is now coming from some large angle relative to the runway. This video is from one of those times. This is an airport where there is not a runway available to make this wind a head wind. So the wind is blowing across the runway.
The airplane wants to come to the runway lined up with the runway. But the wind is coming from the side, so the airplane would be blown off line. To counter this, the pilot will apply angle to the rudder to angle the nose into the wind, and some aileron to counter to keep level. This is called crabbing (like a crab moving sideways relative to where the crab's head points). So the nose is not pointing in the direction the airplane is actually moving, but a few degrees off that. This is fine, but once you land, you want your nose pointed in the direction of the runway and not towards the grass. So once the airplane touches down, the pilot immediately reverses the rudder to straiten out, this is called de-crabbing.
The reason it appears to hover is due to the high winds. As previously described, due to the high winds, with a small ground speed, it still has enough air over the wings to stay flying. In theory with a strong enough wind, it would hover. But that is like hurricane strength.