Near disaster landing in Hamburg
A few weeks ago, a near disaster landing took place in Hamburg airport. An inbound Lufthansa Airlines A320 had been cleared to land and was intending to do so while flying through 75 per hour winds. After conducting a crosswind approach, it struck the runway with it’s left wing and then took off again to finally land safely in another runway. All of this was recorded by a person who happened to be videotaping the landing. He uploaded the video to the Internet and it’s now one of Youtube´s top hits.
During the approach, the wind struck the airplane and made the landing extremely bumpy and turbulent. According to the passengers, the oxygen masks came down and there was luggage flying all around the cabin. No doubt it must’ve been pretty scary. The pilot, known as Oliver A. and 30 years old, was initially criticized first of all for choosing the worst runway possible (Flight Control assigns inbound flights to certain runways, but the pilot has always the last word), and second for having cancelled the landing and taken off after the A320´s left wing had struck the ground. Apparently, the structural damage to the wing might have been enormous, in which case conducting another take off would be the last thing you would want to do.
The funny thing is that, according to a source coming from the German Federal Office of Accidents Investigation (BFU in German), it was not Oliver A. who was landing the airplane; it was his copilot, a 24-year-old woman known as Maxi J. The fact that Maxi was a novice pilot made critics built even more upon the pilot Oliver A. How was it possible that he had allowed a novice pilot to land a passenger loaded airplane in the worst weather possible?
However, and partly thanks to how popular the video has become, not everybody criticizes the pilots. In fact, the German public opinion regards Maxi J. as a hero after saving the passengers from a sure disaster. She did prevent the airplane from crashing after all. On the other hand, the German Association of Airline Pilots also supports the pilots, and says: ‘No one can blame the pilots, the flight security administration nor the airport for this traumatic landing’.
Anyhow, by the time the A320 had struck the runway with it’s left wing and taken off again, Oliver A., the pilot, had taken over the controls and he was the one to safely land the airplane on another runway.
The 75mph winds that the airplane encountered were the remains of cyclone ‘Emma’, which struck all of Europe during the end of February and killed 15 peolple. German authorities had warned all airports of the extreme conditions all inbound flights would encounter. If so, why did Hamburg airport Flight Control allow Lufthansa’s A320 to land in such terrible conditions? A very polemic decision indeed. We’ll have to see what happens.
For those of you who haven’t found the video yet, don’t panic, here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCMTVPjKBXI
Tags: a320, crash, crosswind landings, cyclone airline accidents, emma, hamburg, landing, Lufthansa Airlines, runway
Filed under: Aviation News
One Response to “Near disaster landing in Hamburg”
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Lufthansa A320 - Hamburg landing incident. : The Digital Aviator Says:
March 21st, 2008 at 6:27 am[...] from The Aeroplane Blog Let’s put aside the question as to why they were there in the first place, landing when the [...]
