Storm Ciara hit the UK in February 2020 bringing strong gusty winds across much of the country. And it got me thinking - what would it be like to try and land a General Aviation aircraft in stormy conditions?

Obviously any sane private pilot would stay on the ground, so I loaded up my trusty flight simulator to find out. Weather conditions were set to real-world conditions, which at the time came in at a lovely 25 knot wind gusting 39 knots (just under 45mph) from a heading of 246 degrees.

 

 

Edited February 11, 20206 yr by PIAviation
Embed video rather than just giving a link

Well, you got it down okay. Nice one.

The main issues with landing aeroplanes in the current UK conditions, is of course gusts and the wind gradient making the headwind component drop off as you descend. Neither of these tend to play well with big aeroplanes, since the big ones not only maintain a lot of inertia, but also have a lot of inertia to overcome when the conditions alter. A light aircraft, with less inertia, can fairly swiftly accelerate to maintain flying speed if the wind drops whereas a big jetliner will take a few seconds to do that, so smaller craft can actually cope with wind shear a little bit better.

Personally, I was taught to come in steep and fast when there is a wind gradient so that you get through the gradient quickly and have plenty of spare speed on the clock which you can lose in the flare, and to use the minimum flap setting you can get away with too, so that there is less drag to overcome if the headwind component drops off.

The bad thing about that however, is that a small aeroplane will get blown around a lot more, so you tend to see a lot of rolling motion on small aeroplanes coming in for a landing when the weather is a big rough whereas bigger stuff tends to plough through it, but small craft will nevertheless come in for a landing when bigger stuff might struggle, ironically in spite of the bigger ones generally having a better suite of avionics more suited to making such landings. This is why we had ATR 72s making it in and out of Manchester with no problems the other day, whereas some bigger airliners didn't even bother making an attempt.

I once flew an SZD 50-3 through a thunderstorm, not that I recommend doing so. That was an interesting day lol.

Edited February 11, 20206 yr by Chock