Video: Scary Landings

Scary landings? No not unwelcome monsters from far-away places, or your mother-in-law touching down at the tarmac for her biannual visit…if you see a distinction between the two. Scary landings as in those “Oh no if the pilot doesn’t get this right I won’t make it to the meeting because I’ll be dead” scenarios. Hopefully none of you have or ever will experience one of these frightening events, and even though they aren’t too common, it’s important that every pilot know how to land a plane calmly in emergency situations.

A video by Martin Bogdan compiling landings in which weather conditions hindered their smoothness and safety recently went viral. It gives an interesting look into the great deal of skill the pilots who landed and took off needed to have in order to compensate for the 55 knot winds that were blowing that day. Of course the master of life-threatening landings and Blades Mag’s personal hero, Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, had something to say about the viral vid. If you don’t recall, Sully was the legendary pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, the flight where he halted an engine-less plane in the Hudson River, saving the lives of 155 people. He quoted that the landing and takeoff of a flight were statistically its riskiest periods due to cloud height, wind, visibility, and other obstructive factors. Odd angles can compensate for the high winds (which is why all the landings look funny) but geometry is the last thing I’d want to think of when landing a plane in those conditions. Both of them are liable to kill me.