Thousands of homes were left without power and businesses were forced to shut down on Friday, February 18, 2022, as a result of Storm Eunice, which had wind gusts at 122 mph, the fastest on record in England.
The UK Met Office expanded the danger-to-life weather alert before Eunice tore down rooftops and trees, causing the cancellation of many flights.
Two B-52s were deployed to the UK and carried out a round-trip mission that took them over Scandinavia.
Mode-S could be used to track the two BUFFs as they flew northeast bound to Sweden.
—Gerjon | חריון (@Gerjon_) February 18, 2022
Over southern Sweden, the U.S. strategic bombers were integrated with the Swedish Air Force.
—Gripen News (@GripenNews) February 18, 2022
The B-52s were able to land despite the strong winds.
Their final approach to the base was not stable, with pilots making constant adjustments to align the heavy bombers with the runway. Our friend filmed the arrival of the two Stratofortresses.
The winds were very strong, but they were head on with little crosswind.
Take a look.
The steerable dual-bicycle landing gear allows the crew tocrab the airframe by 20 degrees, which is one detail worth mentioning.
The landing gear can be set up up to 20 degrees left to right of the centerline for both takeoff and landing.
This is what we wrote in a previous article.
As explained by NASA (that has been a BUFF operator) on its website, "the landing gear of the B-52 is of the same bicycle arrangement as employed on the B-47 but has four two-wheel bogies instead of the two bogies used on the earlier aircraft. As compared with their location on the B-47, the outrigger wheels are positioned much nearer the wingtip on the B-52. An interesting feature of the B-52 landing gear greatly eases the problems posed by crosswind landings. Both the front and rear bogies can be set at angles of as much as 20° to either side of the straight-ahead position. In a crosswind landing, consequently, the aircraft can be headed directly into the wind while rolling down a runway not aligned with the wind."
The reason for this peculiar feature is primarily due to the structure of the airframe that features a very long and relatively slender fuselage with a big tail and massive high wings that bear the weight of the aircraft. As a consequence of such design, the aircraft is slow to react to pilot inputs on the flight control surfaces, especially at low altitude and speed. Moreover, the wings are so large that the typical approach in crosswind [that is normally flown applying a Wind Correction Angle (WCA), hence "crabbing" the plane to align nose and tail with the wind direction to counter the drifting effect of side winds and "de-crab" once the main landing gear touches the ground (or shortly before)], is simply not possible.
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