"Robert M. Gary" wrote in message
...
On Aug 19, 3:32 pm, Alexander Avtanski wrote:
Hello,

I just came back from a walk outside my office in Santa Clara. Around
3:00pm I saw something quite unusual - while all the planes from San
Jose International were taking off in N-W direction, there was a
single plane (something that looked a bit like MD-80) that seemed to
_land_ coming from N-W, exactly opposite the rest of the traffic.

If the winds are light its not unusual for ATC to allow you to land
opposite direction. They may have agreed to it only if he kept his
speed up. This may have saved him $1000 in jet fuel.

While this is true, the traffic mentioned by the OP seemed to indicate they
were busy and traffic came soon before and after which led me to believe it
was an emergency. SJC is a fairly busy airport.

In Memphis, FedEx favors landing to the north which allows their planes a
short taxi to their hub. They will sometimes land with very high tailwinds
(30-35 kts) so I'm told.