What is cross wind landing?

Answer 1

Yeah... a very tricky way to land a plane. The wind is blowing at an angle from the runway, and during landing you will slow down a lot, reducing lift and reducing control. Airplanes naturally want to point into the wind (the weather-vane effect) and you must combat that tendancy in order to get the wheels rolling in the right direction when they contact the ground. You must use rudder and aileron to keep the plane going straight with respect to the runway. Failure to do this can result in a swerve or spin on the ground, and this can seriously damage the plane.

http://www.planeandpilotmag.com/content/2004/july/crosswind.html

There's some videos of big planes doing crosswind landing on Google. Pretty scary stuff...

Answer 2

That's trying to land when the wind is coming from your left or right instead of into the wind like you should if at all possible. In order to stay lined up with the runway during a cross wind approach, you have to use the rudder. Doing this causes the airplane to rotate about the vertical or yaw axis. Now, though your direction of travel is correct, the airplane is not physically aligned with the runway (Since it turned a bit). So, at the last second as you are about to touch down, you have to straighten out the airplane so it is headed straight down the runway while still keeping the wings level. Tricky.

Answer 3

it is best to land flying into the wind or head wind, so if wind is blowing north south you would land north south. A tail wind landing would be opposite, so cross wind landing happens when you land N S by wind is blowing east west.

Answer 4

its when you land, but the wind is pushing you to the left or right. this is harder to do then if the wind is coming straight at you and you have to correct for it to have a good landing.

Answer 5

the place the wind is blowing at an perspective to the runway. Pilots deal via the two an offset mindset or via "crabbing" (correcting perspective for the wind). larger plane with extra interia do not want as super a correction perspective than smaller plane (sum of vectors)

Answer 6

The answers above are correct, but you should have asked this question in the "Aircraft" subsection of the "Cars & Transportation" section, not in "Astronomy & Space"