Prepare for Landing

Typical windy afternoon at Hale County in Plainview, TX.

Toward the end of a commercial flight, the captain always announces, "Flight attendants, prepare for landing." We need to do that, too, when we fly our little planes. 

Should be easy, shouldn't it. Well, things can become difficult, as we shall see in two cases. The first one we handled poorly, but the second one, well. 

Let's go back to captain Chesley Sullenberger, who landed an Airbus A320 with both engines out on the Hudson River and thus saved all lives. We learned later that he had the habit of regularly checking destination weather, regardless how far away. 

It seemed a splendid idea, and we have gotten into the habit of doing that every 30 minutes. It has turned out to be an excellent idea.

On to the first story. We are flying from Aero Country, our home base, to Plainview, TX. The main destination runway is being repaired, but the alternate runway has ample length. 

While enroute, we keep on checking the weather in Plainview, as per our rule. At first, the destination has no winds, the next half hour there is a bit of wind, and then the wind picks up a bit more. All of this is crosswind, but of no concern since wind speed is low. 

Another hour goes by, and winds have become 7 knots. Then the wind becomes stronger, to the point that we become mildly concerned. 

And finally, with another 15 minutes to go, winds are 9 kts, gusting to 16 kts. We begin to realize that there may be a problem. Sure enough, when we fly final for the alternate runway, winds are really strong and gusty, probably 12 kts gusting to 20 kts. 

A steady strong crosswind is one thing, but when it is coupled with strong gusts, we have a challenging situation. 

Indeed, just before touchdown, it is difficult to kick the plane around to set it down on the upwind main wheel, drop the second main wheel onto the runway, and finally lower the nose. But we manage to do so while maintaining direction and without high side load on the main wheels. 

Next we taxi to the FBO, get fuel, and take off again. The wind has increased even more. While taxiing, we carefully move ailerons and the elevator according to the axiom "dive away from the wind." 

Since we have to make several sharp turns, this becomes an exercise in imagining wind direction and moving controls as needed.

For the takeoff run, we position the plane on the upwind side of the runway, thus giving us lateral space as the wind tries to push us sideways. Our plane has nose gear and rudder coupled, so we effectively cannot use the rudder. 

For the first time, I fully realize how nice a freely castering nose wheel would be. We quickly rotate so that the nose wheel comes off the ground and we get control over the rudder. Dancing along on the mains, we leave the ground as fast as possible, turn immediately into the wind, hold the nose down to avoid a stall, and, with a sigh of relief, start climbing out.

What went wrong? We should have planned an alternate airport, and when winds started to pick up, should have switched instead of insisting on landing at Plainview. Or even better, knowing about potential winds at Plainview from past experience, we should have realized that landing may very well be a challenge, and simply scheduled another airport for refueling.

On to the second story. We are flying in the Rockies of Colorado and intend to land eventually at the Erie Municipal airport near Denver. Situated at 5,519 ft, this is a high altitude airport with a relatively short 4,700 ft runway. 

But our plane can probably handle that. Before we commit to the airport, we check out the statistics of the single 15/33 runway. For runway 15, there is an upslope of 0.9%. Oh boy, that's a lot.

Next, we check the terminal weather forecast for Denver for the time of landing the next day. It predicts winds from the south at 10 kts. So, runway 15 would be the correct runway. But there is no way that our plane can handle the takeoff. 

We recall a big sign at the Rawlins, WY, airport, which has a similarly upsloping runway. It cautions about takeoff attempts; a number of people have died trying. Instead, the FBO generally advises takeoff the next morning, when wind direction is always reversed and a takeoff run downhill and into the wind is possible.

Given all this information, we scrap the idea of landing at Erie, and instead pick Greeley, CO, which has two long runways perpendicular to each other and is at lower altitude to boot. A good decision, indeed.