What is happening here?
This is like the five-second rule aviation edition where
if you don't land on the runway but you get there within five seconds,
it still counts as an acceptable landing.
Viral debrief, Episode one.
Coming up!
Hey, 74 crew! Welcome back!
If you don't know me, my name is Kelsey.
I'm a 747 pilot.
My channel 74 gear is all about aviation.
People often send me viral aviation videos from YouTube or other places
and ask me to explain them.
So I thought: "All right! I'm just going to take them all,
put them together in one video and we'll break them all down"
If you end up pursuing aviation as a career
at the end of a flight when you're in training,
they'll do what's called a "Debrief".
They'll go over what you did well, what you did bad,
things you can improve on. All those types of things.
So what I'm doing in this series is I'm taking
viral aviation videos and we're breaking them down.
Or debriefing them.
If you have an aviation video that you want to see in Viral Debrief,
go ahead and send it to me.
Now, you can't link it on YouTube in the comment section
because it will go into this massive spam folder that I'll never see.
The easiest thing to do is go to my Instagram account,
copy the link, send it there
and if you want to make my life easy and please do that,
just tell me what time the video actually starts.
All right! Let's check out this first video.
What is happening here?
This is like the five-second rule aviation edition
where if you don't land on the runway,
but you get there within five seconds, it still counts as an acceptable landing.
No big deal. Nothing happened.
Totally normal landing. Totally normal.
By no means, am I a quick learner when I went to flight school,
I took a long time to learn a lot of different things.
It looks like he stalled off the side of the runway just by the way he falls.
Like he got slow. Didn't do anything to get back on the runway
and then just fell out of the sky a few feet above the ground.
Look at kind of the way the wings are as he comes down.
But he made it back to the centerline as fast as he could
so you have to give some credit to the pilot for doing that.
I've told you in some of the videos in the past
that aviation is a humbling experience.
There are going to be a lot of times that you're going to feel very stupid
as you go through flight school.
It doesn't matter who you are,
it can be a humbling experience.
You might do very well in one section and struggle in another section.
Someone else may be the exact opposite of you.
But there's an old saying:
"A smart man learns from his own mistakes and
a wise man learns from the mistakes of others".
And that's exactly what we're doing in this Viral Debrief series.
Something you'll learn as you go through flight school
is that you can always go-around
and that's essentially what this pilot should have done in this scenario.
He wasn't anywhere close to the runway.
It looks like he stalled one of his wings.
It ended up just plopping onto the ground.
But he was able to make it onto the runway.
Plane seems like it's okay. It's operating fine.
His flight instructor, if he saw that, is
probably going to ask him what happened and
I'm guessing the plane's going to need an inspection.
There's never a reason to land off of a runway like that.
If it doesn't look good, go-around and try it again.
So close!
Oh! He bounced it!
Hard to know exactly what the pilot was thinking in this situation
but they obviously realized they were getting very low.
It's also hard for me to be critical of a fighter pilot here because
I know that if it was me, I would have gone inverted
because, you know, do it for the gram.
And that's probably why I never got invited to fighter pilot flight school.
You see these lights here?
They're used by the pilots for vertical path guidance.
It's just another tool to help us get where we want to land on the runway.
It will give you a descent path so you land in the touchdown area of the runway.
Obviously, he's ignoring those but those are on the runway to help him out.
So I'm not sure why he's so low.
And then you can see him right here bouncing down the runway.
So it looks like he got low and then gave some extra power to make it to the runway
which is obviously important.
Then he came in flat and fast and that's probably why you see him bouncing.
A bounce landing can be caused by a few different things but
the most common that you'll experience as you go through flight school,
is pulling back the power when you're too high.
When you pull back too high, the energy runs out
and then the plane slams onto the ground
and bounces back up in the air.
So that's the most common.
What you have to focus on is getting better at power management
so you can keep some power in as you get onto the runway.
Oh yeah! I remember seeing this actually right after it came out.
No!
Go-around.
Oh!
There are a few points to discuss here.
First, you see him here to the left of the centerline.
You can see the center line right here
which means he isn't even in the middle of the runway right now.
That's not a massive issue by itself
but he hasn't even touched down yet and he isn't correcting.
I'm guilty of this as well. Landing way off the centerline.
I know when I went through flight school it seemed like it took me a hundred hours
before I could constantly maintain centerline on my landing.
Actually, that would not surprise me!
I think I always used to land on the left.
It's just something that takes some practice and some confidence
to make sure you're always able to keep it going right down the middle of the runway.
Now here in the yoke, you can see him start putting in
correction to get back toward the middle of the runway.
But at these slow speeds, the ailerons which are used to direct the plane
don't have that much of an impact
because there's not a lot of air going over the wing.
Then, he starts heading off into the woods here.
I actually had a landing like this in flight school.
It was a very narrow runway.
I think it was in Napa. It was a small runway in Napa.
And we landed and we were right towards the edge of the runway.
And instead of trying to save it like this guy did,
I just gave it full power and got back up in the air
and came back and tried it again.
So it's definitely something that happens to everybody
and it just has to be that judgment.
Doesn't look good, go-around.
Which is what he should have done here when he lands.
He isn't even pointing down the runway.
Look. He's pointing to the side here.
You never want to see your aircraft in a 90-degree angle
unless you're a fighter pilot
or in some type of acrobatic plane.
Also, your first thought shouldn't be what happened to my GoPro.
And pointing at the grass at that angle,
he's definitely going to exceed the well-established five-second rule
that we established in the first video.
At the end of the day, being a pilot comes down to good decision-making.
All these happen and that's fine. People make mistakes.
I know that I've made some.
I've never gone under the grass like that but people make mistakes
and sometimes it's just the situation is worse than others.
Then I can understand.
I do have to question however taking that video footage from your GoPro
and posting it on the internet.
That is a little harder for me to understand.
I love the car.
I love the car going down there.
"Yeah! No big deal. Just driving down the road".
"All normal".
It looks like the pilot's trying to take off way below
the speed he's supposed to take off at.
So he's either too slow or he's too heavy or both.
You see here how the nose is up really high?
At that angle, the plane is never going to be able to climb
because it doesn't have enough power to actually get off the ground.
I've talked about this as past videos but in all planes
whether you're flying a small 172 or a 747,
you're going to want to pull back a little bit
so the plane actually will get up in the air
but then you want to let it flies itself off the ground.
You don't ever want to jerk it off the ground or pull it so far back.
That aerodynamically it's never going to climb
which is exactly what's happening here.
You don't ever need to yank the plane off the ground.
If you need to yank it off the ground, there's something wrong.
Obviously, in a situation where there's an emergency
or you need to get it off the ground,
that might be the very, very small percentile that you need to do it.
But in some cases, if you pull it back too far,
you're gonna end up in this exact situation.
So this poor plane and the innocent car never had a chance.
Gear up!
Throw the gear up!
I think that was a wing strike.
Put the gear up!
Clearly, this is a stiff crosswind landing.
And if you aren't familiar with a crosswind landing means
the wind's not coming right down the runway. It's coming from the side.
Which just means it's a more challenging landing for the pilots.
The wind is coming from the left side.
As the plane comes into the frame, you can see the pilot kick the rudder right here.
They straighten out the plane.
With very strong winds like this, when you're in a jet,
you want to wait until you're closer to the ground to bring the tail around.
I try to make it 10 feet or less to prevent
this exact situation from happening.
I should say I made this exact same mistake as a pilot on the 747
and other planes I've had in the past.
But more on the 747. I had something very similar to this happen.
Probably, my first month flying the plane.
I didn't let the wind get underneath my wing.
I had the wing correction in
but I did kick the rudder too soon and it pushed us towards the side of the runway.
So, this is something similar this has happened to me.
I ended up landing on the runway fine.
I was a little off the centerline.
Which on the 747 matters more just because of the width of the aircraft.
But it is something that happens to all pilots.
Nobody's perfect.
It's just something we're going to learn from.
The wind is coming from the left.
The pilot puts his foot on the rudder too early
because he's so high off the ground,
the upwind wing here is getting a lot more air under it.
And if you don't correct for it, which is what the pilot doesn't do,
that wing gets lifted up possibly from a gust of wind.
Which then is blowing the right-wing down here.
And then pushing off the edge of the runway.
Which leads to an over correction and possibly
a wing strike again on this left-wing here.
And then you can see them forgetting to put the gear up.
Clearly, they were a bit frazzled with everything that was going on
and possibly hitting the wingtip.
It's totally understandable.
There have been many pilots that in a go-around or in a crazy situation
that forget to do something like that.
The first thing you want to do is be flying the plane but
you're going to want to put the gear up because
it's going to climb a lot better with the gear up.
If you want to see an aviation movie with extremely questionable decision making,
check out the Hollywood versus Reality that I did
on "American Made" starring Tom Cruise.
If you haven't seen that movie, I'll put a link to it right here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.