Accident Report: Gone with the wind

How many times have you trained as a student pilot in wind conditions that left you feeling exhausted but educated, with skills greatly elevated, after a session of touch and goes, stop and goes, go-arounds, and, yes, taxiing, in left crosswinds, right crosswinds, and sometimes both in one approach? How many times have you had one of those full-body wind workouts since those early training days?

“Once in a while” is not the answer.

There’s no better place to find colorful descriptions of the kinds of winds that sweep across airport runways—sometimes sweeping aircraft along with them—than in the reports of accidents involving pilots who tangled with one of the varieties of wind during a landing or takeoff.

Sometimes the investigative products of those incidents support the pilots’ account of wild winds, but often they include surface weather observations from which you could infer that the pilots’ version was, let’s say, embellished. That's even more pronounced when the official determination of probable cause makes no mention of the wind, frequently noting only that the pilot failed to maintain directional control throughout the sequence. If mentioned at all, the wind is more likely to be cast as an accomplice than a perpetrator.

When a Cessna 172 lost control while aborting a landing on Runway 22 in Payson, Arizona, after the pilot reported drifting to the right of the centerline on June 4, 2017, the National Transportation Safety Board’s accident report noted these conditions: “The METAR reported that the wind was variable at 4 knots and that the temperature was 84 degrees F. The field elevation was 5,504 feet, and the altimeter setting was 30.14 inches of mercury. The density altitude was 8,255 feet.”

The accident report zeroed in more on the pilot’s awareness of the air’s density on aircraft performance than on the air’s sideways motion, stating the likely cause as “the pilot’s inadequate preflight planning that did not account for high density altitude conditions and his subsequent attempted go-around in conditions that prevented the airplane from attaining a positive climb rate and resulted in its subsequent descent and impact with rising terrain.”

A few days later, in Nashville, Tennessee, another loss-of-control accident occurred when a 125-hour Cessna 172 pilot tangled with the wind after landing. “The pilot reported that, during the landing roll, ‘a strong wind’ pushed the airplane to the right and he was ‘unable to regain control.’ The airplane impacted a taxiway sign and nosed over,” the NTSB reported, adding, “The pilot reported that the wind was from 020 degrees at 6 knots. The airplane landed on Runway 2.”

The bottom line of these and dozens of similar accidents is that you can study wind in a book, memorize your aircraft’s demonstrated crosswind velocity, and watch scary videos of airplanes trying to land in ferocious winds. But none of it substitutes for working your hands and feet—especially your feet—on the controls to keep an airplane’s nose pointed down the centerline, while being as aggressive as you have to, and as patient as you must be, with pitch, bank, and power to set the aircraft down on target and on speed.

When a pilot shows up at an FBO for a rental checkout or a flight review, any flight instructor who has pounded out many hours in traffic patterns in such conditions can usually tell almost immediately how well today’s customer can handle wind. That’s because along with building proficiency, practice builds alertness to the conditions and a readiness to deal with them that the unprepared individual lacks.

The difference is unmistakable. The “sudden gust” that blows one pilot off the runway center line may only cause another to lower the wing a little bit more into the crosswind while adding a touch more opposite rudder pressure to keep the airplane pointing straight ahead. This is one skill for which there is no such thing as too much practice.