When you think of landing accidents that happen in a crosswind, you usually think of windy days. Really windy days.
And it’s true, a lot of landing accidents do happen when the wind is gusting to 25 knots or more. But a surprising number of these accidents happen when the winds are light – even when the wind is less than 10 knots.
How is that possible? When you’re dealing with a light crosswind, you only need a little correction to maintain centerline, right?
Here are three landing accidents from the NTSB’s database where the crosswind component was less than 10 knots. We’ll go through each of them, and then talk about what went wrong.