198kts winds?? Holy cow, I had never seen such strong winds!
Hello Marcelo.
To give you a very simplistic understanding of what is happening:
Imagine you are crossing a river on a boat. The current is pushing you sideways while you row your boat towards the other side. To arrive at your destination, you need to row against the current because otherwise you will arrive somewhere downstream and not at the pier as you wanted.
While it’s an analogy, this is what happens here. Air behaves like water, because both are a liquid in terms of dynamics. Your airplane always moves in relation to the air. In theory you could even fly backwards in a very strong headwind. That is why you have two airspeed readings on your display. GS (ground speed, which is an absolute reading) and TAS (true air speed, which is a relative reading). So while your Airbus moves through the air at only 439 knots, the absolute speed over ground is 465 knots because the air is pushing your aircraft from the west at a slight backward angle.
So the autopilot compensates to stay exactly on the course line. You would have to do this manually otherwise. This is also called WCA or Wind Correction Angle and is one of the basics of navigation that pilots learn during initial training.
Pilots use formulas to calculate these things in their head or even better, use a flight computer like the E6B - although most people probably use some app nowadays in daily flying if needed.
Hope that helps and keep on learning. Don’t be bothered by people making fun of you.
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Thanks for highlighting this. Not come across his channel before; spent a couple of hours last night watching some of them.
Good information, entertaining presentation and succinct … he doesn’t waffle on for hours like far too many YouTube content producers do.
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Jet stream.
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