The direction and strength of the wind can also affect lift and Guy Gratton, a professor of aircraft test and evaluation at Cranfield University, believes this was the problem for EasyJet’s flight EJU7008 from Southend.<\/p>\n
“The wind, being 50\u00b0 off the runway heading, would give almost no headwind. Headwind is usually there – in England the wind is usually from the south-west, [which is] aligned with Southend’s runway, which points at 230\u00b0, and helps shorten take-offs,” he says. <\/p>\n
“On this occasion, it wasn’t and there may as well have been almost no wind at all. This would be quite unexpected and can indeed cause problems,” he adds. <\/p>\n
The problems were spotted when the safety calculations were done, the airport says. <\/p>\n
One way to overcome the problem, Gratton adds, is for the aircraft to travel further along the runway to give it time to reach the necessary thrust. <\/p>\n
At Southend Airport, however, this was not possible as although the runway was extended in 2012, it is still relatively short at 1,856m (6,089ft). <\/p>\n
By comparison, Stansted Airport’s runway is 3,049m (10,003ft) and Luton Airport’s is 2,162m (7,093ft). <\/p>\n
Gratton says another way to address the issue is to make the plane lighter, which usually mean passengers disembarking or removing luggage. <\/p>\n
He adds it is a “straightforward solution and it was quite right that EasyJet’s dispatcher and captain would not take-off until the airplane was within limits”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The direction and strength of the wind can also affect lift and Guy Gratton, a professor of aircraft…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-538974","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}