Viral debrief.
Easy, easy, easy!
Oh my God!
Coming up!
Hey, 74 crew. Welcome back.
If you don't know me, my name's Kelsey.
I'm a 747 pilot.
My channel, 74 gear, is all about aviation.
Now this video is going to be mostly on tail strikes.
A lot of you have sent me multiple tail strikes.
So I thought it to put them all together in one video.
If you have a video that you think would be great for this Viral debrief series,
just send it to my Instagram.
Let's get into it.
I was really trying to look there when the plane was going over.
If you could actually see where the tail strike happened on the aircraft,
but from this far away, you really can't see anything at all.
This clip is kind of unique because it's a mix of Viral debrief
and air traffic control versus pilots
because I have the audio that's going on with the pilot
and air traffic control after the tail strike happened.
A tail strike can happen for a few different reasons.
One of the most common is that the pilot actually pulls back on the yoke too hard.
It can be wind related where the wind is impacting things,
but at the end of the day,
the pilots are responsible for safely getting the aircraft off the ground.
And in this case, they pulled back too far and they struck the tail.
If you aren't familiar with the term tail strike,
where you see this puff of dirt show up,
that is actually the tail of the plane hitting the ground.
Now, some planes are easier to have a tail strike on than others.
Some planes, you may be able to rotate 14 or 15 degrees nose up
when you take off from the ground.
Others, you might only be able to get three or four or five degrees
until you get away from the ground and then you can climb and pitch up higher.
So it's different for every plane. I don't know this plane,
what its actual original pitch angle is.
And I have no way of calculating how much they pitch,
but it was obviously too much.
The manufacturers of these planes. This is obviously a Boeing 747.
They do testing to see exactly how much of a pitch up it's going to be
before the tail starts dragging on the ground.
And that's typically the main cause of having a tail strike.
Other things that you can have is the trim setting.
There's a trim setting that we set before we take off.
You could have set that wrong. That could cause a tail strike.
You could rotate too early.
That could cause a tail strike
because you're wanting to get the plane off the ground.
But manufacturers are now starting to create a thing
where if you actually are rotating too hard, you're pulling back too much,
there is actually technology to prevent the plane from having a tail strike.
Like it will reduce the angle, even though you're pulling back,
it will reduce and prevent that tail from strike in the ground,
which is really interesting.
And like I was talking about earlier about the different pitch angles
here, you can see the tail strike on a 747-8 is slightly less
than that of a 747-400.
Now I'm not good enough to tell the difference
between that small variance of a pitch angle.
It's kind of like when I'm flying the Dreamlifter
that modified 747 people say,
oh, it feels like this.
And then I'm like, man,
it feels like a 400 to me when I'm flying it.
So some people are maybe more sensitive to it than I am.
When I'm flying I have a pitch angle that I go for.
And then once we're away from the ground,
then I will follow the flight director to maintain the speed
that I need in order to get the flaps up.
You can see on their climb out here,
they're doing just a normal pitch angle.
They didn't do anything where they nosed over the plane or anything to indicate
that they were even aware that there was possibly a tail strike.
The problems that you can have when you rotate too aggressively though,
is a tail strike.
The other time that you'll see that is if you're going too slow.
If you put in the speeds and you pull back
and you want to get the plane off the ground
and you pull it back to far,
then you're actually having an aerodynamic impact,
which is way past what we're trying to cover here.
But if you're pulling back and you're holding the nose up
and the plane's not getting off the ground,
it can really impact you from actually taking off by pulling back too far.
Let's see the second part of this clip.
Cargojet 1328 Narita tower
Yes sir go ahead
Roger on rotation I saw a puff of smoke or
something like that I'm not sure if it's dust or smoke
from the tail, confirm had a tail strike.
No idea Cargojet 1328 stand by
Roger.
Cargojet 138 contact Tokyo departure 124.2 and report any
further comment with departure control.
Copy that 124.2 Cargojet 1328
Cathay 006 Narita tower runway 16R is closed, runway 16R closed for inspection
for possible debris execute missed approach and maintain 4000.
Now you may be thinking,
how did this pilot not even know that their plane had a tail strike?
Now I've never had a tail strike. I'm not planning to have one.
I know there's some people who would probably love to see me have one
so they could Viral debrief me.
But luckily I haven't had one,
but we're going to talk about how you might know.
Luckily if you become a pilot,
they have already thought of everything.
They don't want the pilots coming up with their own solutions.
The engineers are going to know more about this aircraft than they are.
So a tail strike can be identified by a noticeable bump or jolt,
scraping noise from the tail of the airplane
or pitch rate stopping momentarily.
On something like a 747, if you were to hear the tail scraping
from a couple hundred feet away
on top of the war of the engines as you're taking off
on top of the fact that you probably, hopefully have noise canceling headphones.
If you're able to hear that scraping, things are going really bad.
And I think that's why they put this section here where it says
about cabin crew being part of identifying the noise.
That is definitely a call that you're going to want to make
during the sterile environment.
Typically during sterile below 10,000 feet,
the cabin crew are not supposed to interrupt the pilots.
However, in this case,
if you were to have a tail strike and you were sitting in the back
of the aircraft and you heard that,
that is something that me as a captain,
I would definitely want to have that information.
I would want to know,
Hey, cap! On rotation I heard something dragging
and I'm in the AFT galley.
I heard something on rotation back there scraping.
For sure that's a call that you're going to want to make
before the 10,000 feet call.
Because what you could have is actually a new pilot that's up there,
that's unfamiliar with that aircraft and they may not have felt that feedback.
It could have been a very slight bump, a very slight bump at the ground.
And so if you are sitting in the other seat
and that's a long distance away on a 747.
I know this wasn't a 747 in the video. Don't get too excited,
but if that's a long distance away.
So if it was just a light scrape and your hands aren't on the controls,
you may not get that feedback that the other pilot got.
So on a plane, on a 747,
that's full of passengers and there's flight attendants that are in the back,
they hear that scrape.
They should make that call.
If you are flying and you feel that feedback like you're normally pulling back
and all of a sudden you felt it like stop.
Well then, you know,
and that's definitely one of those things that you just want to confess and say,
Hey, that didn't feel right on rotation.
I think we may have hit the ground or whatever that is.
It's definitely just best to fess up right then
instead of making the situation worse.
Here's why.
You often hear me refer about a book that we use in case we have emergencies.
This is a page straight out of that book.
And here is the page that's regarding tail strikes.
And you see right here at the very top,
something very important.
Continued pressurization of the airplane can cause further structural damage.
I think most of you can realize that pressurizing an aircraft
that is structurally damage
is not going to be a great idea,
but look what happened here with these pilots.
As you can see here,
they made the decision to fly over the ocean and continue their flight.
Now, these pilots are definitely not the first to fly after a tail strike.
And there definitely won't be the last.
I was told about it when I was going through my initial ground school on the 747,
about a very similar incident involving a 747.
What they did is they had a tail strike, very similar to this.
I almost think it might have been in Japan
and they flew across the ocean as well.
So it's one of those things that if you have a tail strike,
regardless of the situation
or air traffic control says, Hey,
we think you had a tail strike.
At that point, it's probably better to say,
Hey, let's be better safe than sorry.
Let's follow this checklist.
Let's not pressurize this aircraft and put ourselves over the middle of the ocean,
possibly in turbulence or a thunderstorm.
Let's go back and land and sort it out there.
That's the safer movement.
At the end of the day, I would talk about safety is your number one priority.
And this case they're flying cargo,
but it shouldn't matter.
When I'm flying passengers or when I'm flying freight,
I make the exact same decisions when it comes down to safety.
I might fly it a little bit differently as far as for like
the bumps and the turbulence and stuff like that.
But when it comes down to the safety decisions like this
it's 100% the exact same.
So just as a reminder,
if you're ever turning around over an airport
on your way to fly across the ocean
and you see these little trucks coming in behind you,
they send another plane on a go-around,
It's probably time for you to think about not continuing your flight
and coming back to land.
Making decision to continue the flight after air traffic control
warns you and advise you that they think you had a tail strike,
that was a bad choice.
Having a tail strike, well,
anybody can have a bad day.
That can happen to anybody, that could happen to me.
But once you have that information and they said, Hey,
we think you had a tail strike.
At that point, I think it's best to be conservative for sure.
And say, Hey,
let's go back because maybe we did have a tail strike.
Maybe it was so light that we just didn't even notice.
But I think the company,
any airline is going to hear,
Hey, this is the situation.
We took off.
We didn't feel anything.
Air traffic control advised us that they thought we had a tail strike.
Based off of this book right here, which we call a QRH.
It says right here, you should go back to the airport.
And in that case,
what you'd have is a bunch of people going,
Hmm, tails strike, that sucks,
but you wouldn't have a couple hundred thousand people on the Internet
and some random pilot in a hotel judging your poor decision.
Man, it's kind of a short clip.
But something that might surprise you is that having tail strikes
during a landing is actually more impactful
and possibly more dangerous to the aircraft
than having one when you're taking off.
Something that's happening here is sometimes when your plane is coming into land,
it starts to sink really fast.
And so you flare more to prevent the plane from slamming into the ground.
So that's just a natural reaction from a pilot.
Your plane is sinking in towards the ground.
And as a pilot, you know,
pull back, keeps your plane from going down and you want it to go up.
That's a natural reaction,
but that can be very dangerous.
Imagine what would happen if the tail of the plane
were to impact the ground right here.
Especially when you factor in the fact that the pilot is actually pulling back.
So he's pushing the tail down
even faster than the plane is sinking into the ground.
Now, different airlines have different strategies
as far as how they want to handle the gust and windy days.
Some airlines like mine will keep in a bunch of extra speed
as you're coming into land.
And with keeping that extra speed in there,
it prevents from the plane settling or sinking really fast.
A lot of times you end up landing going very fast,
but that's better than the plane falling out of the sky,
which is kind of what happened here.
And then pilots just go through their natural gut reaction as pull back.
I'm sinking too fast.
The problem is is exactly what you saw.
They almost hit the tail.
This is something off the Internet from Boeing.
And you can see what it says right here.
Do not hold the airplane off an attempt to make an excessively smooth landing.
Now, have I done this exact same thing that you saw in this video?
Yeah.
I have done literally exactly that situation.
I can remember it very clearly in my mind right now.
We were coming in, it was a windy day.
The bottom of the plane really started to drop out.
The difference was from what I did and what this pilot did here
is that when the plane started to drop out,
I just naturally, instinctively added a little bit of power.
By adding some power that helped push the plane forward a little bit
and stopped the sinking impact
and that helped to get the plane to move forward and stop that slamming effect that
was going to happen if I had just kept that pitch angle.
However,
if you take that slamming impact,
that's going to be a lot better than pulling the nose back even more
and slamming the tail on the ground.
You can see right here, the pilot made the right reaction
after pitching the nose up too much.
They pushed the nose forward and they just took the hard landing.
Now, in my case, when that happened to me, luckily I was flying a regional jet.
Now those little jets, it's a lot less weight.
It's a lot easier to get the engines to spool up.
And so you can push it up and have the plane move forward very quickly.
That strategy on the 747, maybe wouldn't have worked out as great.
But something to know is that it's better to take that hard landing,
let the passengers get off saying,
oh man, you suck.
And the flight attendants are making fun of you.
That's better than having a tail strike
because everybody is going to be talking about you.
And you're going to get a nickname something like
"Tails strike Timmy".
And you don't want to have a nickname at aviation.
Trust me.
I've seen it happen. And it's never for a good reason.
He's got this one.
He's lucky.
Yeah, he's got that.
Easy, easy, easy!
Oh my God!
Oh my flipping.
First, I'm not sure if this guy is sponsored by the hotel
or it's just something that he does in order
to be able to record for free off of the roof
or balcony or wherever he's recording from.
But who do we know that also makes YouTube videos
from around the world in hotels?
Just something I thought I should mention,
but he jinx the pilots right here when he says this.
Oh, he's got this one.
Yeah. He jinx them right away as soon as he said that.
So while the last video before this one
was the pilot trying to hold it off the ground.
This is actually from the pilot trying to get away from the ground
during a go-around.
That's what caused the tail strike on this one.
This is from the same paper from earlier.
And you see right here, it says overrotation during a go-around.
When things don't go as planned during a landing,
you do a go-around,
which is exactly what these pilots did.
That is the right move.
What surprises me though is just how high the wind got.
It got so high that it pushed the other one very close to the ground.
And that's what caused the go-around.
You can see the windsock right here.
It isn't running exactly down the runway,
but it doesn't look like it's at a full 90 degrees either.
Could be the camera angle, but you can see right here,
they're doing a pretty good job keeping the wings level for the landing.
Keeping your wings level on landing is something I wish I had learned earlier.
But something that gets taught during flight school is when the wind is,
let's say, coming from the right side, get your right wheel down first.
They don't want to have your wing blow up like you saw right here.
So they'll tell you,
get your right wing and your right wheel down and touch the ground first,
then your left and then your nose.
That's something they get taught.
But when you do it on bigger jets, it doesn't work out the same.
So the wings aren't level right here,
which causes the right tire to touch down first.
He's trying to keep that right wing down,
which is where the wind is coming from and I understand that,
but that throws him back in the air,
probably because he has too much speed or energy.
And then as the energy dies out, he hits really hard on the ground.
Now to this point, the pilot hasn't done anything wrong.
They've touched one tire down early.
They were coming in maybe a little bit too fast.
They've had hard landing.
Those are all part of being a pilot.
Some days it's really awesome.
Some days it's embarrassing.
Sometimes it's in front of 200 people or in my case,
it might be in front of 450 people.
But either way, things are totally normal.
Here's where it starts to go bad though.
Now that the energy dies,
he hit hard and every pilots made that mistake.
But what he does is he lets the wing go up here.
A terrible, terrible habit that I got into.
And a lot of pilots do it and I've done it even on the 747
is that they think once you've landed, you've kind of done it.
Once you get your mains on the ground, you don't need to worry about that
keeping the aileron or keeping the wing into the wind.
That's a terrible habit to make.
Like I said, I had it happen on the 747.
I've done it on other planes.
Now once you get slowed up enough, it doesn't really matter.
But at these speeds,
the plane is still right at the speed that it wants to be at in order to fly.
So if you don't keep the wing down, as soon as your plane gets onto the ground,
what can happen is exactly what you saw here.
The wind on that wing is still moving really fast.
So if you get a gust that right wing, it still wants to go fly.
And that's exactly what happened.
And if your right wing is going up,
well, your left wing is going to go down towards the ground
and nobody wants to have a wing strike.
So when the wing goes up,
you see the decision was made to do a go-around.
And you can see that because the nose of the aircraft now pitches up,
which was the right decision.
However, you can see they overpitched and overrotated.
And then someone up on the flight deck realize that because you can actually see
the nose come back down as they rotated too much initially.
Now I have done all of the things that you've seen in this video here.
I've had a one wheel touchdown and then bounce back of the air
because I was going too fast.
And then I have it result into running out of energy and slamming into the ground.
I have done that.
I have also done what this pilot did,
which is let the ailerons go neutral.
And then the wind got underneath the wing like that
and started lifting that wing up.
I have done that too.
Luckily I have not then had to do a go-around and then struck the tail.
I have not done that.
Had they put that correction back in a little bit, not a lot.
It's something about aviation that's weird is
you have to make very quick decisions,
but not abrasive or rash.
You might have a little bit of control in there.
You don't want to go really far one way,
because what will happen is you thought your left wing was going to hit.
And then you say, oh no,
my right wing is up and you go really hard the other way.
And then what you do is you end up slamming that right wing on the ground.
And you think, man, that really is not what I had intended for,
but that has happened too.
You see that sometimes when the planes are wobbling down the runway,
partly, sometimes that is because they're overcorrecting one way or the other.
And then after you initiate that go-around,
then you have all of the other things that you have to do,
which is really something I really wish air traffic controllers
would sit in with pilots, maybe in the simulator
when they have an unexpected go-around
and just watch the workload that builds up for us very quickly.
Because as a pilot, you're coming in and your mindset is
landing the plane, landing the plane, landing the plane
and then in a split second,
you go from landing the plane to flying the plane.
And taking it away from the ground.
And everything changes.
And a lot of things have to happen.
Both pilots, the workload increases a lot.
And then you have on top of all of that,
air traffic control saying like,
what's the reason for the go-around?
Also do this.
Hey guys, do this thing.
While the pilots are trying to fly the plane and reactivate the plane.
It's not anything like when you take off.
When you take off, you have a plan in mind.
When you do a go-around,
you're now listening to what air traffic control is telling you
while trying to get the plane configured up to continue to fly.
Which takes us to this point,
which I think you know what we're going to talk about.
If you've watched a bunch of my Viral debriefs,
you know what I'm going to say here.
Please, don't forget to put the gear up.
If you've enjoyed this video,
I know for a fact you're going to like one of these two.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.