Plane in flight(John McArthur / Unsplash)Crosswinds can make flying difficult, but pilots have many ways to make your flight safer.This segment originally aired in July 2023.This transcript was edited for clarity and length.Bill Burton: It's time for us to take a look at the Science Behind the For ecast as I am joined by WAVE 3 meteorologist Tawana Andrew. Good morning, Tawana.Tawana Andrew: Good morning. We're smack in the middle of the summer travel season, so I think a lot of people will be hitting the airports to get to their destinations pretty soon.BB: There's going to be a lot of people flying from here to there, and we're here to tell you about one thing to watch out for and learn a little bit more about. It's crosswinds. What do we need to know about crosswinds?TA: Crosswinds can make a landing or takeoff in a flight, I'll say, interesting. I think that's one of the ways to put it.BB: Well-chosen word.TA: Crosswinds are very common across the entire planet. The National Weather Service defines a crosswind as a wind with a component directed perpendicularly to the aircraft. It's basically going at a right angle to the aircraft and the direction that the aircraft is trying to travel. When the wind is very strong, this can be quite dangerous for takeoffs and landings because these crosswinds impact a plane's ability to maintain a stable flight.Typically, you have aircraft landing into the wind. You'll see that at the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. You can typically tell where the wind is coming from by where a lot of those planes are landing. Aircraft depend on consistent, stable airflow under and over their wings to sustain lift and to fly. When you have a crosswind, that temporarily changes the flow of air, interrupting the lift. If the wind is strong enough, it's trying to blow the aircraft off the path that it's trying to travel, which, if you're on that plane, is not the situation that you really want to be in.Since this is a pretty complicated situation, what pilots will do when they're trying to compensate for a crosswind, especially when landing, they have a couple of options. One is that they can change their approach speed, and they have these pretty complicated calculations that they can do. A lot of them are already done for them inside the manual for the aircraft, so you can just quickly look it up, which helps to compensate for the wind gust and make the landing a little bit safer.Another option they have is to fly a steeper path. When you have a lot of terrain-related turbulence, let's say you're landing in an area that is windy and there's a lot of mountains nearby, they'll fly a steeper path so they're not affected as much by the wind as they're coming down. They can come in for a safer landing, or they can use less flaps. The flaps, if you ever sit on the wing — it's my favorite part of the plane to sit — you can see the flaps going up and down, and they are super vital for takeoff and landing, especially landing when you're trying to slow down. You'll notice they'll push it all the way up, but since the head-on wind isn't as strong, it may not take as much effort to slow down, so the pilots will usually use less flaps in those situations. Because if a pilot uses full flaps in some crosswinds, it can cause the plane to turn a little bit more into the wind, which is called weathervaning. Or if the wind gust is strong enough, it can actually cause the wind to actually lift up the wind. Then you start to turn sideways, and it's just not a fun situation. ...read more read less