It is early March and a storm system is moving through. This is what the meteorologists tell us; they have moving moisture simulations and low-pressure markings and a lot of confidence. But the urgent and violent winds that push now against the windows and whistle in the gutters and bend the naked wintered trees are something more than a benign attribution – more than an act of “moving through.” They are gale force winds.
We listen to the gusts and the ticking of the joints that hold the house together, and we watch the taller trees succumb to the surging air’s assault. And I can hear the airplanes circling nearby Newark Liberty International Airport.
How are they going to land and why are they even thinking about it?
I recently took a propeller plane to Raleigh, North Carolina for business. I was not aware that propeller planes were used for intermediate distances in the Nuclear Age, and the landing experience was particularly “choppy” (to use the pilot’s aeronautical vernacular) due to the breezy conditions of the surface air in Raleigh. Since we had been asked upon boarding to spread about the cabin in order to better distribute the weight, I should have expected the kind of World War II era choppiness that we encountered in our disorderly descent.
But the planes above Newark are large commercial jets and the winds outside are fierce and random – and one has to wonder how the pilots and the air traffic controllers can assess and predict. How are the pilots confident that a strong wind gust will not hit their airplane in the vital seconds before touchdown?
The aeronautics industry refers to the sudden changes in wind direction or speed as “wind shear.” The term became a household word in the U.S. in the mid-80s after two significant airplane crashes were attributed to wind shear and were responsible for killing nearly 300 people. Something had to be done to identify and to maneuver through or around wind shear events.
The problem has not been fully solved – or really even solved at all. According to Boeing, “wind shear was the seventh most common cause of fatal jet accidents worldwide during the past 10 years.” However, there is a sense among certain authoritative circles that the wind shear issue is behind us and that technology introduced to commercial jetliners has overcome the safety question. Referencing NASA, “an adaptation of Doppler radar – the storm prediction tool used by many television meteorologists – sends a laser ahead of the aircraft to reflect energy from aerosols (minute particles) of moisture and to measure the motion of the moisture. This translates into wind speed, and pilots can use this information to be aware of changing conditions. Because of this radar, combined with computer generated alerts, wind shear crashes have all but been eliminated from the skies.”
Tell that to the passengers and crew of the Lufthansa jet that nearly crashed on March 2, 2008 after being broadsided by a violent wind gust while attempting to land at Hamburg. The video footage of this attempt can be found on Youtube.com, where the plane is seen coming in effectively sideways before dipping a wing into the ground and lifting off again hurriedly. While Lufthansa praised the pilots for their “absolutely professional maneuver,” the Associated Press reported on what is seen in the video footage – that “the left wing grazed the runway for a moment.” The question here likely is, why attempt a landing in gale force winds that were described by the Guardian as causing “chaos in Germany and other Central European countries over the weekend?” Is such an attempt a praise-worthy professional maneuver or is it foolishness?
So, we are left with another modern conundrum – coming to a collective understanding that we are subject to the randomness of unguided air displacement. The well-traveled among us can certainly share stories of experiences with tailwinds and crosswinds and headwinds – and these stories are at times uncomfortably harrowing. But have we come to an understanding on the dangerous decisions made between air traffic controllers and pilots during questionable turbulent wind events at airports worldwide?
According to Michigan Tech’s Geological and Mining and Engineering and Sciences Department, “the following three things are vital to the survival of an aircraft while experiencing extreme wind shear: altitude at which shear is experienced, the pilot’s experience, and type of aircraft.” Perhaps a fourth vitality should be included in this assessment: the decision of whether or not to go ahead with take-off or landing maneuvers in high wind environments. Or are those crashes catalogued by the airline industry under “pilot error?”
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