Videos of Insane B-52 High Crosswind crab landing. Crosswind landings are a pretty standard maneuver, and military, commercial and private pilots must know what they’re doing when approaching a runway in such conditions.
For a layman, however, it could look and feel pretty scary if you’re onboard, especially if you’re looking out the window and all you see is grass and no asphalt.
In the below video, you can see B-52 doing High Crosswind Landing
Here is another video of B-52H Landing & Crabbing
In the above Video A Boeing B-52H, number 61-0039 from 23rd Bomber Sqn of the 5th Bomber Wing based at Minot AFB in North Dakota coming in to land on R/W 09 at RAF Fairford during the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) 2010.
During its arrival procedure, the pilot asked ATC to do a low flyover to ‘try out’ the crosswinds going over the area as all other aircraft were coming in on R/W 27. He was not happy with the strong crosswinds and ended up coming in on R/W 09 hence why it had to come in at an angle and ended up crabbing down the runway after landing and deploying its drag chute. Coming up the runway it ends up taxiing off to the North side of the airfield at H/P ‘Foxtrot’
What is a crab landing?
A “de-crab” is pointing the nose into the wind on approach and correcting it just before touching down. Alternatively, the “crab” is best done on slippery runways and consists of touching down while still pointing towards the crosswind and correcting once on the ground. Lastly, a “sideslip” utilizes the crab technique but means the nose down the centerline on the final approach and banks the wings to touch down the upwind gear first before settling down the downwind gear.
This means B-52s don’t have to straighten out when they land. While crabbing, they can simply land in that position and taxi while not parallel to the runway.
