Watch 5 Hours of Airplane Takeoffs in 30 Seconds | Hacker News Reader

Watch 5 Hours of Airplane Takeoffs in 30 Seconds

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75 pointsunfed20 comments

The more interesting video was the crosswind landing one at the bottom of the page. Really incredible!

If you want to see some more, check out the world famous approach at Kai Tak (Hong Kong), now out of use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtnL4KYVtDE

The migration from Kai Tak to Chek Lap Kok is also a story of its own. All the staff and equipment were moved in a few hours from one to another while some of the planes scheduled to land on the new one were already mid-air.

Pilots are awesome. Aviation engineers are awesome. When I observe aviation, I'm always impressed. It really seems like one of the pinnacles of human achievement. Everything from the planes to the pilots to the ATCs and beyond... everyone is just at the top of their game.

As an aviation enthusiast, I was surprised to learn something from that video; If you look closely, the rear landing gear appear to align with the direction of travel. I always thought they were fixed.

I'm afraid that's an optical illusion, the main landing gear is indeed fixed along the yaw axis. However some aircraft have main landing gear units that can pivot somewhat along the pitch axis.

B-52 will do that: "A notable feature of the landing gear was the ability to pivot the main landing gear up to 20° from the aircraft centerline to increase safety during crosswind landings" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B52

Ah yes, I was watching it on my phone. Just rewatched it in 1080p and see what you mean.

It's hard to tell that they're moving forwards. It looks like they're just hovering straight down to the ground.

Microsoft Research had a neat system that could automatically create these sort of time-compressed videos without overlapping interesting areas. The suggested use case was reviewing surveillance videos. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the demo they had.

The rudder deflection on the cross-wind one is the most interesting. The landings is just a lot of ILS approaches so not much variance, although you can see the auto-pilot compensation on the LHR approaches, which is kind of cool.

Cross wind landings are fun once you get used to looking at the runway from the side window and getting tossed around in a Cessna like a kite.

Cross wind landings are fun once you get used to looking at the runway from the side window and getting tossed around in a Cessna like a kite.

Happens in larger planes (as noted in other posts) as well. Flying into Colorado Springs is always an adventure.

That photo is a photoshop; some planes wouldn't be able to take off at those angles.

I'm also suspicious of the video: won't planes on localizer approaches all be flying the runway centerline? I just don't see the opportunity for as much horizontal deviation as the video shows. (Though I guess the video is taken pretty far away from the airport since the landing gears aren't down. Maybe we're watching departures instead of "landings" as the video title suggests?)

Not really. Approach != landing. Those are visual conditions, most airplanes we landing on CAT I (or visual) precision system. By the time the airplanes were so low no auto pilot was on, actually.

Looks normal (I used to fly for a living)

I agree that approach != landing, but the title of the video is "landing".

It is a landing flight path and is about 1 mile away from the airport. Departures are westward over Ocean Beach unless there is heavy fog and they reverse, pretty rare. The video is taken from the middle of Balboa Park under the Laurel street bridge over the 163 freeway. I can sit out on my deck and watch these plane's final descent and their horizontal position and altitude varies quite a bit and I'm about a half mile from where the video was shot.

I'm not a pilot, but those angles look fine to me. The pixels on the other hand ...

Awesome video. The little plane slowly following the mass of huge, fast planes makes me giggle.

just read it in the news some minutes ago: http://avherald.com/h?article=459fa8f6

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