I need you to drop the plane to 8,000 feet.
It is possible, yes,
to come down like a rock, really fast.
We are trained to do that in case of severe emergency.
Hi, my name is Capt. Zoya Agarwal.
I am a commander on the Boeing 777 with Air India,
and I have been doing this for the last 18 years.
Today, we are going to be looking at pilot emergencies
in movies and judge how real they are.
We're in an uncontrolled dive,
descending out of 21,000 feet.
Got a jammed stabilizer or something.
They are in an uncontrollable dive,
but they also have a problem with their stabilizer,
which basically keeps the airplane
stable in the pitch control.
Pitch means vertically, to go up and down.
Evans, listen to me.
When I say I want you to retract the flaps,
retract the gear, trim us nose down.
Why would I trim down?
This is not how it's supposed to be.
As a pilot, you are ingrained with this thought
from the very beginning.
Whenever something goes wrong,
pick up the quick-reference handbook, which has a list
of all the potential failures, including this.
I can command my copilot to pull the checklist.
I would follow that, realistically.
He's trying to trim down, he's trying to get the flaps out,
he's trying to get the gear out.
I don't know what he's trying to do.
For me, it's a very huge walk outside the box,
which I would not step out of.
When I tell you I want you to push these forward,
full power, full throttle. Can you do that?
Flight attendant: Yeah.
You will never call a flight attendant
into the flight deck to help you to fly
when both of you are alive.
You have a two-man flight deck.
One is a captain and one is a copilot,
and that's all that you need.
So it's absolutely unrealistic.
Here we go. I've got control.
This is based on a real-life incident,
the Alaska Air flight 261 in January 2000.
This is a very extreme maneuver.
I respect, in real life, whatever captain may have done.
The only planes that fly inverted
are acrobats and probably military.
It's an MD-80, and this is not approved
and test-flown for that.
They're supposed to be secured, our overhead lockers.
The manufacturers design it in the best of the way.
If, maybe, sometimes passenger may leave it open,
maybe that's why.
Radio: 227, it's 1 o'clock, three miles.
Commendable. We can say that now,
because the flight went on for two more minutes.
My assessment of the situation would be
follow the checklist, do your best, and that's it.
Zero.
Because inverted flight and everything,
that does not make any sense to me.
This flight was Sichuan Air from Chongqing to Lhasa.
They had a windshield crack,
and the copilot got sucked out
because of the differential pressure.
He's just trying to come down really fast,
so he could reduce the differential pressure.
And the less the differential pressure,
he could easily pull him back inside the flight deck.
That was realistic.
We have a system called GPWS,
which does not allow us to fly so close to the terrain,
like, mountainous region.
Would have been going all over the place in real life,
because it warns you way ahead of any possible collision.
Did you see the squawk 7700?
That is the emergency squawk code.
You enter 7700 on the transponder,
they will move mountains for you,
the air-traffic controller, because they know
that you're dealing with an emergency situation
and try and help you out as much as they can.
No. 2, you saw a cabin crew member
came inside the flight deck, the cockpit, to help him out.
This is the kind of scenario that would warrant that.
Not when two pilots are awake and absolutely fine and fit.
Every storm is different. The storm, visually,
is something that you would see on your weather radar.
You would also see what kind of storm it is,
its convective activity,
what is happening within the storm.
And after years of experience,
we know the kind of buildup that is and how far.
Oh, this was realistic.
Except for that thing above the mountain.
So, I think I'll subtract, like, two marks. 8.
The hell was that?
This is absolutely not realistic.
If you were to have damaged wheels for whatever reason,
there could be adverse effects.
If you remember the Concorde crash,
where this airplane was taking off from Paris to New York
and the debris from the wheel,
it got inside the fuel tank and it ruptured it,
and it kind of just blew up
the whole Concorde, unfortunately.
So even a small piece of debris can have a huge impact.
The only thing which made it
more palatable for me is the seat belts.
People were at least seated. Thank God for that.
We're going down! We're going down!
Sasha: Take over.
Take over?! What do you mean, take over? Sasha!
Sasha: Relax!
If there were some emergency,
I would always be in the flight deck to solve it first
and take it from there.
You cannot hit an object with an airplane.
Airplanes are very aerodynamically clean,
the way they're supposed to fly.
Do you remember "Sully"?
Like, something, a small bird,
how it can just take away the engines?
This is the impact when you're adding speed
and a foreign material or foreign body.
Minus 10.
Sorry, but what do I do?
Please show me something realistic!
Copilot: Mayday, mayday, mayday.
Mayday. We have lost avionics.
"Mayday" is definitely not just in the movies.
There are many ways of doing different things
to let the air-traffic controller know
that you're suffering an emergent situation.
However, when you say, "Mayday, mayday, mayday,"
it definitely just straightaway attracts attention
and everybody just goes quiet,
because they know that you require that emergent attention.
The hell?!
They only drop when there is actually
a need to be dropped,
like in case of a loss of cabin pressure.
But this does not happen.
There isn't loss of cabin pressure over here.
Well, of course, I have heard of having a rat or something.
If one passenger spots one rat,
that entire airplane is sealed up,
fumed for a very long time.
It's not about an animal, it's about the damage.
Because, if you think about a rat,
it can chew up wires,
which can potentially control the flight controls.
Oh, my God, minus 2.
I like the fact they were wearing their uniform,
and that's it.
It's impossible to land here!
How much fuel you have, sir?
Only about 920 kg's.
That means hardly one or two attempts.
I love Bollywood.
They were very, very low on fuel.
That situation should never come in aviation,
because you're dealing with human lives. You're in air.
We always have enough contingency plans in place
to have enough fuel with us at any given point in time,
and if we don't, we initiate our plan B,
which is a diversion much before.
Even if you have low fuel,
you don't linger around at a place which has bad weather.
You go to some other choice to start with.
Going blindly.
Clear for landing runway 16.
No. Clear runway 34.
Controller: 34 is the opposite wind pressure!
Headwind will become tailwind!
This is a very unrealistic scenario,
except for the fact that the air-traffic controllers
were surprised that he was coming into landing
with high tailwinds.
What he was trying to say was that,
typically, if you're landing, when you go in,
you should ideally have winds coming from the head.
And if you have tailwinds,
which is coming from behind you,
you tend to touch down a little bit more into the runway.
If you're landing in terrible storm,
well, we have limitations. We abide by that.
The air-traffic controller was shocked
because, obviously, the winds
were probably much, much more than his limitations.
Brace for impact.
You know, this is so weird, because the copilot,
I mean, I love the fact they've shown a woman,
but the copilot has to be assertive.
My first officers,
I've always told them, "You're the second in command.
This airplane, after me, is like, you're in charge.
Always act like one."
It's a part of our crew briefings
that if there is anything
that you're not comfortable with me doing,
you call that out.
My God, don't get me started.
Would you even cross a road with your eyes closed?
I mean, you wouldn't even walk out of this door
with your eyes closed.
You're dealing with human lives!
Minus 100.
Because, blind landing? Oh, my God, no!
I need you to drop the plane to 8,000 feet.
Get to the lowest pressure differential you can.
This is definitely more realistic.
Basically, what he's trying to say is
in case of a rapid decompression,
when we have a decompression within the airplane,
your inside of the cabin pressure is really high
and the outside is really low.
So your differential pressure, or delta P, as we call it,
is higher, which is really detrimental,
which is why the masks come down.
Otherwise, you cannot breathe.
The pilot put the airplane in that kind of an attitude
to kind of sabotage the efforts of the gunman
and destabilize him in doing
whatever potential damage he was doing.
So that was a great move.
Come on, you [beep]!
It is possible, yes,
to come down like a rock, really fast.
We are trained to do that in case of severe emergency.
In case of rapid decompression,
that does require you to descend really, really fast.
Because every single nanosecond that
you're spending time wasting or not coming down,
you can potentially have a lot of damage behind the cabin,
people passing out because of lack of oxygen.
So, effect of an explosion is far more.
Like, it's a depressurization and, potentially,
you have a far bigger impact in terms of the damage.
We do have protocol that we follow in case of explosives.
I do not know if I can openly discuss that out.
An airplane can have a partial damage to it,
and it can still very much land back,
so long as your controls are not affected,
there's no major damage to the essential services
which are required for the flight control of the airplane,
they are fully functioning.
They're designed to be like that.
Let's give it a 2.
I'm feeling good. Generous.
Shaw: Tell him to take off!
Oh, my God, I love that part.
Totally a killer.
You would never just take off on a whim.
You know, "Hey, I feel like taking off,
and somebody's calling me to take off."
It doesn't work like that.
The factors of takeoff speed depends on many things.
Even if, like, one degree of temperature change
or slight wind change or pressure change,
we recalculate our takeoff performance.
For example, you're expecting 300 passengers
and 100 of them don't show up.
That changes the takeoff performance.
We have this figured out way in advance,
and we ensure even if there is a minute change to it,
we recalculate everything.
But, rest assured, it's never a woman calling us
on the phone, "Take off, take off!"
You would never have a car even close to a runway.
It's all very sterile environment in real-life airports.
What you're essentially doing is there's drag being added,
which is pulling it down along with the weight.
And when you're taking off a huge jet, like Antonov,
you don't have any room for any drag. Like, nothing at all.
Unfortunately, when something like this happens
in real life, upon impact, with the fuel and everything,
these things do tend to happen.
But this is ridiculous.
Under my command, such a scenario would not even happen,
because I will never, ever come on the runway
if I do not have my takeoff performance calculated
and adjusted to the T.
And not only me, every single pilot,
to keep safety paramount.
Minus 20.
This is like the movie "Sully."
I'm missing Capt. Sullenberger. He did such a great job.
And it's also making a more dramatic version of it.
It's come to a halt just right there,
before the bridge. It's brilliant.
Because, obviously, he has no control over the water.
There are so many other factors at play as well,
which eventually will decide the way it's going to turn out.
The current of the water,
the direction in which it's flowing based on the winds,
it can play a role.
Like, we've had hull losses
where the airplane has broken up on impact
when they've had to ditch over water.
As a pilot, it's not in your hands.
You still do what you can do for your best.
That's just luck.
They came together for Capt. Sullenberger.
So I'm guessing for him also, it can come together.
It's a 5, only because of Capt. Sullenberger.
This is dedicated to him.
My favorite pilot emergency in a movie is "Sully."
How he did the whole landing over the Hudson.
Thanks for watching!
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