Re: A380 Aerial shots
1) How hard can you hit the deck in these airliners? Obviously the undercarraige must be rated fairly high, but sometimes when touching down hard i tense up worrying about the poor wheels!!
I think it's fair to say that it will take a lot more than you might imagine. There are g sensors that record the impact (at numerous points). You'd need to exceed around 1.8g before the engineers would need to look at anything. Most landings are probably around 1.2g, and very firm ones, around 1.4g. Roughly.
2) Lets say you got a 25-30+ knot crosswind (don't know how often that happens).. is there much crab angle coming into the runway, and is it hard to pull such a large aircraft straight when you're landing?
You can work out the crab angle pretty easily. Divide the crosswind by your ground speed in nautical miles per minute. So, a 30 knot crosswind, and a g/s of 140 knots (2.33 nm/min) gives just under 13° of drift.
The aircraft have a lot of rudder power, so it's easy enough to point it down the runway. But, you have to make a couple of things coincide. You don't want to remove the drift too soon, as the aircraft may well be pointed down the runway, but it will immediately start drifting towards the runway edge. On smaller aircraft, you can drop the upwind wing slightly, to counter that effect. But, you can't do that in the big stuff. So, basically, you have to reach the point at which it's pointed down the runway, exactly as the flare ends, and you touch down.
On the Boeings, they make that a lot easier, by allowing you to land with ALL of the drift still intact. You don't have to push it straight at all. In practice, in light winds most people do, but on wet runways it's much better to land with all of the drift still there. Generally I used to work on the theory that if I got bored in the flare, and had nothing better to do, I'd start to squeeze the rudder in. I didn't really care how much of the drift I removed though. The aircraft (767 and 747) didn't present any problems straightening themselves after touchdown.
Airbus have a 5° limit for the amount of drift that is allowed to be present at touchdown, so you do have to go to a lot more trouble to get rid of that drift. Flare too high, or squeeze straight too soon, or too fast, and you can give yourself some issues.
3) Do you have a "feel" for when to flare? Reason i ask is that you're so far from the back wheels, it might be hard to judge? I'm guessing..
You learn to judge where the wheels are. Actually, you just try to get your eyes to the same point, and it takes care of itself from there. Initially, you tend to rely on the rad alt callouts, but you soon learn the picture.
