On Saturday (March 1st) a Lufthansa Airbus A320 was attempting to land on on runway 23 at Hamburg, Germany in a severe gusting crosswind.

They near as toucher didn’t make it. Video found on LiveLeak

The aircraft was on a domestic flight from Munich and encountered 30-40kt crosswinds on landing.The port wingtip actually hits the runway ripping off the winglet and causing some damage to the wing before the pilot can get the wings level and apply go-around power. It looks like the starboard wingtip may drag also. I’m not sure if applying pressure to only one maingear will trigger the spoilers; you really wouldn’t want them to deploy when you’re this far out of shape!The aircraft was able to go around and landed safely on the next attempt.Flight Global identified the aircraft as D-AIQP and airliners.net has a rather stunning photograph of a the port tip being dragged.

It almost defies belief that plane spotters will hang around in such inclement conditions. Perhaps they have a certain sense of the macabre.

Here we have two videos, found via The Register, of a wind turbine generator failing catastrophically in high winds in Denmark.

The wind turbine in the videos has apparently failed to ‘feather’ it’s blades and has subsequently got into an overspeed condition. Engineers had been sent out to attempt to stop the turbine but they had [wisely] retired to a safe distance when they realised that it would be too dangerous to work on the turbine. They did, however, leave their van underneath and it nearly gets flattened by the generator head.

There’s quite a bang just as the blades separate. I’d be interested to know whether it’s just the sound of the stress failure or if the blade tips actually went supersonic at the moment of failure.

The turbine was 60 meters (~200 feet) high and was located at Hornslet near Aarhus. The Danish Climate Minister has ordered an investigation into the failure of this turbine and another turbine earlier in the week.

Both videos show the same turbine failing.

Here we have a couple of videos that have been doing the rounds recently courtesy of collegehumour.com

The premise is thus: What would meetings be like if they were conducted like forum threads?

Caution: May not be safe for work!

Here we have a little sketch found on Youtube from the South Bank show. Bird and Fortune do their usual interview style sketch, this time with the interviewee being an investment banker.

This actually goes a long way to explaining the realities of subprime lending in an easy to understand and rather amusing fashion for the layman.