Time to bring the second post over, this is one of my favorites actually, Crosswind Approaches! When it comes to crosswinds, we as pilots try to avoid them. They tend to make it harder to land because we have less practice with them, and it takes a lot more listening to the aircraft to make them work well. You can ask any of my students, one of the biggest things I stress in any type of training is listen to the aircraft! By this I don’t mean entirely listen with your ears (although that is part of it too) I mean feel what the airplane is telling you, and see what the airplane is telling you, and then respond based on that. I typically instruct in tandem seat aircraft, and therefore have no way to even see the gauges half of the time, which means I have really learned to hone the skill of listening to the airplane, and responding accordingly. So again, something I tell all of my students when they focus too much on the panel, “Think about me in this back seat, I can’t see the gauges, and I just performed the maneuver to show you how to do it.” Ok, so now that we have the feel down, let’s talk about a little technique. There are two techniques that you can use to approach in a crosswind, crab the airplane on final, or slip the airplane on final, so let’s talk a little about each of them. Using a slip to combat a crosswind on final (my preferred method) After turning final, if we point the airplane down the runway while straight, level, and coordinated, then our crosswind will blow us off of the centerline. So the first method we have of combating that is by using a slip, this involves using opposite rudder and aileron to keep the centerline of the aircraft parallel with the centerline of the runway. For this method, the rudder controls the direction the nose of the aircraft is pointed, and the ailerons control the drift left and right across the runway. The one downside to this method is the fact that you are uncoordinated throughout the approach, however the upside is the fact that it prevents the possibility of creating a side load on the aircraft as it touches down. In a tailwheel like I use, this means everything! Using a crab to combat a crosswind on final Our second method of dealing with a crosswind is using a crab angle. If you are a pilot, think about what you learned while doing rectangular pattern’s, same thing. For those of you who are still aspiring to be pilots, think about it like this. Airplanes fly through the air (mobile), not along the ground (stationary) like a car, which means as the air moves, your road surface moves along with it. The other good way to think about it is when operating a boat in a current. If you have a river you are trying to cross with your boat, and you try to paddle it across at a 90 degree angle to the shoreline, you will not end up on the other side directly across the river from where you began, you will wind up downstream. Well the wind acts on an airplane like current acts on a boat. So back to our boat, if we needed to get directly across the river, we would need to point our boat upstream a little bit as well, and this is the same process we use with our airplanes. We point our airplanes a little bit upwind, so that it doesn’t carry us downwind. The hardest part of using this method, is the fact that in the flare to land, you need to kick a rudder right before touching the ground to prevent touching the pavement with a side-load, yet if your timing is not correct, you could still get blown across the runway, or even overcorrect and get side-load the other direction.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 16:44:56 +0000