Viral Debrief.
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.
If you're new to the channel, this Viral Debrief series I break
down different aviation videos that people have sent to me.
If you have a video that you want to see on the series,
the two easiest ways to get them to be is either send it to my Instagram
or post it on the 74 gear forum which is free.
All right! Let's get into it!
Maybe some things have changed since flight school
because obviously, there was a clear nice runway
to land on and they chose to land on the grass but
let's see exactly what happens here.
It looks like their speed actually coming in is okay
but they hit nose down. They land on the nose.
Because the aircraft doesn't flare at all.
Watch this first touch down again.
If you aren't familiar with the term flare, right
before the pilots actually touch down on the ground,
we pull back a little bit.
That slows the aircraft down and it gets it ready to actually touch down.
You'll notice that commercial aircraft do it but
also the best landers in the world. Birds do it.
If you watch birds as they're coming in to land on a wire for example,
you'll see them do this exact same thing.
They'll pull back and their wings actually slow them up as they come into land.
It's the same thing that's happening with the
commercial aircraft or any aircraft like this.
There's no flare. So if you look at how he
lands, it looks like he lands on the nose first.
I think he damaged the nose gear here but I'm not sure.
Then he adds power and they try to land perpendicularly
against his runway here which is a bit strange.
And then they land nose first again.
Since we're talking about crushed landing gear, there are two
different types of landing gear that you'll see on an aircraft.
One is a tricycle landing gear. That's what
you're going to see on every commercial aircraft.
There are more tires in the back than there is in the front.
That's what type of landing gear there is in this video.
The other type is called a tail drag or tail wheel
and that means they have usually two tires in the front and one in the back.
The easiest way to figure out which is which,
wherever has more tires, that's where you're supposed to land first.
If you have two or more tires in the back and one in the front,
you need to land on those main gear first.
In this case, he has tricycle landing gear but lands on the nose first.
That's never gonna work out.
As he hits hard again on the nose, it looks like the nose gear collapses.
This same thing will happen to an airliner if you land on the nose like this.
With the nose collapsing and the momentum going forward,
there's nowhere for the plane to go except to flip over.
This happened very quickly, I'm sure for the pilots,
I'm sure they didn't know that the nose was cracked there.
If that happened in real life and you knew your nose was cracked,
what you'd want to do is go
line up and land on something like the pavement.
And you'd want to keep that nose off the ground for as long as possible
to prevent the plane from flipping over.
All right! Let's see the next one!
Nice recovery.
I talked about in that previous video about a porpoising.
That's what porpoising is.
You saw how the aircraft is going up and down like that?
I've talked about it in other videos.
Porpoising is something that happens a lot at flight schools.
I've done it. I'm sure more than once at flight school.
It's just because you haven't figured out when to flare and
making those judgments to the ground and
the speed and all those types of things.
It's a lot that's going on. Your brain gets overloaded.
It's not something you ever want to do in a commercial aircraft.
Overall, it was a very good recovery here by what I think was a flight instructor.
It looks like, just from the outside, a student pilot was trying to land.
They started to porpoise.
Then the flight instructor added some power and
then got it back into a normal descent rate.
My guess is because I've been that student before,
porpoising down the runway and the flight instructor says: "Hold on"
and they take the controls over, add some power
and then just bring it in for a normal landing.
And you think: "How come I couldn't do that?"
It's just part of going to flight school.
So if you're going to flight school and you're having this situation,
don't worry. It's something that we all have to work through.
Here it comes in now, this JetBlue flight 292.
With that front nose gear pointed sideways.
Hold the nose.
Landed a bit long there, huh?
Seen a lot of smoke but so far it's still intact.
The landing gear.
Now slowing down as best he can.
End of the runway.
Mighty strong landing gear here.
That's the tires burning out there.
There's a thousand foot markers.
Best of all possible scenarios, it did not collapse.
The chin gear of that aircraft did not skid down the runway.
It has come.
Oh, yes! The chin gear!
The chin gear of that aircraft.
I'm just kidding. I've said a bunch of stupid
things and I'm not even doing it on live television.
They're referring to the nose gear.
The tires up in the front there, it's called the nose gear.
This happened back in 2005 and obviously pretty
successful results but let's look into it.
If you aren't familiar with the story in 2005, this JetBlue flight
couldn't get the nose gear to line up when it was going into the gear door there.
So they had to come back around and land again at LAX.
The crew did a great job.
They landed and at the end of the day, I judged
pilots based off of the result of their flight.
So they got a good job. They saved the aircraft.
Obviously, that nose gear was going to be trashed regardless.
But there are some things in here that you may not have
noticed when you watch the video for the first time.
First, you'll notice that they used up a lot of runway.
And part of that was the pilot that landed. Landed a bit long.
Every pilot's done this.
I've done it personally a bunch of times.
I just don't have people with cameras that are filming my landings.
It's just something that happens and this is an unusual situation.
Another reason that the plane went so far down the runway,
is that the pilots weren't using any brakes
and the thrust reversers weren't out.
Now, the thrust reversers doesn't actually reduce your stopping distance.
It just helps protect your brakes.
But the reason I mentioned the thrust reversers is
because you can't see if they're adding brakes or not
but you can see that the thrust reversers are now.
The reason that they're not going to want to add
the brakes here is because it's going to actually
push more onto the nose of the aircraft.
And they want to keep the weight off of the nose as long as possible.
Because you don't know exactly what's happening
while you're sitting up there in the flight deck.
Something that these pilots did very well is that when you're landing,
you are used to doing muscle memory.
So if you're going to have some type of landing that's not normal,
you have to remind yourself and the other pilot will remind you this as well,
"Hey! Don't do this or don't do that" because
your muscle memory is going to tell you,
Throw the thrust reversers out or do something, put on your feet on the brakes.
So doing this, they obviously did a great job.
I'm sure they talked about it a lot while they
were circling around and getting ready to land here
but they did a great job.
Notice these bars right here?
These are the thousand foot markers and I mentioned that as well during the video.
That's typically what we're aiming for when we're landing.
We'll just be landing the other way.
They're aiming to land on those thousand foot markers.
Obviously, the plane is going the other direction
so I'm guessing he stopped with about 750 feet
to go before they got to the end of the runway.
That's really not a lot of extra space when you're
looking at the overall length of that runway
being probably about two miles long.
Another thing that the pilots did very well here is they kept the nose off the ground
but not for too long.
Sometimes what you'll see is pilots will come in
and they'll keep the nose off the ground
and they'll keep it off for too long
until the wings stop generating enough lift
and that nose slams on the ground.
I've seen people do that more on smaller aircraft,
possibly regional jets.
They're keeping the nose off for a long time
and then when the wings stop creating lift,
slams that nose down.
They're trying to keep the nose off the ground for as long as possible
because they want to have the plane going as slow as possible
before that nose touches down.
But there's kind of a balance.
You keep it off too long, the nose slams down
and now you possibly have a much worse situation
and you put it down too fast now your plane is going really fast
and you don't quite know how the nose is going to react.
So these pilots timed it out very well.
They left it off long enough to help the plane slow down
but not so long that it slammed on the ground.
Notice here as they're coming in how long
they're keeping this nose off the ground here?
And then they let physics do the rest.
Again, it's easy for anyone as they're watching us to say:
"Oh! I would do this" or "I would do that differently"
You don't know until you're in the heat of
battle which is what these guys are dealing with
until you're right there, you don't know exactly how you're going to react.
I think these pilots did a great job.
As I said earlier, I judge pilots based off the results.
This is an unusual situation, not something that you normally train for.
A sideways nose landing gear. That's not a normal thing that you would ever train for.
But they landed it right down the middle of the runway,
they stopped at the end of the runway, they saved the plane and nobody got hurt.
Sounds like a win to me.
Let's see the next video.
Big plane.
The reaction from the crowd:
"Oh, oh!"
Yeah I know, it's not normally something that you see.
So there's some things that the pilot did very well here
and some things they probably could have done differently
for possibly a better result.
You'll notice here it looks like the pilot goes to rotate
or get the plane up in the air?
And as the pilot is doing that, that means he's ready to fly.
But the plane is not ready to fly.
See how the one tire comes off but the other
one just isn't ready to leave the ground yet?
There are a few things that can cause that.
I'm not going to go into all the details of the aerodynamics
but I'm going to list off a couple things that could cause that.
One, the pilot could be trying to get the plane off the ground too early.
I don't think that's the case in this situation because,
typically a pilot that's going to be flying this aircraft
is probably pretty familiar with its flight characteristics
and the speed that it would normally rotate at.
So I don't think that's it.
Another possible situation is the aircraft is at a higher altitude
and again, I don't think that's the situation either.
The two more likely situations would be the aircraft is
heavier than the pilot was planned for or thought it would be
or it's very hot.
And it's created a situation where the plane is feeling
like it's at a higher altitude than it really is.
I think that's the situation.
Another thing that you'll notice as you look
at this video here is the windsock here.
It's suggesting that there's a minor tailwind.
But nothing that would at all be a factor when
the plane is trying to get off the ground.
Something that's really cool for airline
pilots is that we don't ever have this problem.
Every time that we're flying, we're able to
punch in, obviously the airport that we're at,
the temperature, the weight, all those things.
We punch all these factors that help the plane fly into a computer.
And then it spits back all of the numbers for us.
So it tells us at what speed we're ready to get the
plane off the ground and a bunch of other things.
You don't have that when you're doing general aviation.
Some of the times you're having to guess and that's obviously what happened here.
The pilot thought that the plane was gonna be ready to go
but it wasn't ready to fly yet.
And here's where it starts to get into a little bit of trouble.
You'll see here that once the plane comes back onto the ground?
it looks like the right tire is actually off the runway.
And with a lighter aircraft like this,
this can start to complicate things very quickly
because that right tire starts to drag which
wants to bring the plane more into the dirt.
Of course, what is your natural instinct when
your plane is getting pulled off the runway?
It's to stop.
And that's what this pilot did.
But that can really backfire in this type of aircraft.
Remember earlier I talked about a tail dragger versus a triangle landing gear.
This is a tail dragger.
Those main gears are in the front.
And if you slam on the brakes too hard, it's going to flip over.
Watch this.
Notice the back side of the plane coming up here?
That's from the pilot stomping on the brakes.
See how the tail starts to come down again?
That's a pilot letting off the brakes because they
see that the plane is going to actually flip over.
The pilot could have made this situation a lot worse.
Had they just stomped on the brakes because they were nervous,
he evaluated the situation as the tail went up, he felt that tail going up,
and realized, well, this is going to make it a lot worse.
Better off to just stay in the dirt.
Sometimes like in this particular case,
it's going to be very hard to get the plane back onto the runway.
I don't know the systems of this aircraft,
really one of the very few things they could have done,
if they had differential braking,
meaning the right pedal handles right brake and the left pedal handles left brake.
They could have done something with that
braking to pull the plane back onto the runway.
That would be very hard to do and you know at the end of the day,
this plane wasn't damaged, very much I would guess,
because he didn't get it all the way over and have a prop strike.
Which means the propellers hit the ground.
If that happens, it gets really expensive.
Something happens here behind the Cessna
and I don't know what happened but the crowd clearly liked it.
I guess it hit some type of a hole it, spun around.
And then, that was it. It stopped right here.
This was quick thinking by the pilot,
he could have done several things to make the situation a lot worse.
I don't know exactly what the cause was of the plane not getting off the ground.
But it obviously wasn't what they planned for.
But at the end of the day, he's going to be able to probably get an inspection
and probably be able to fly out later that day.
No problem!
What?
That one kind of reminded me of the guy who drove into the hangar.
You're driving along, there's trees and a fence
and then you just don't do anything. You just keep going.
I kind of wish there was side cameras here so
you could see the guy's face as he looks over like:
"Man! What did we hit?"
I talked about it in other videos,
if your plane isn't doing what you want to do
you need to do something different.
I'm not sure really what they thought was going to happen here.
The plane obviously wasn't going to be able to take off at that speed and
not over those trees or clear that fence.
I don't really know what to tell you.
That was just dumb.
If you want to see me doing some terrible landings,
I played a Microsoft Flight Sim.
You can watch some of my terrible landings right here.
Or if you want to see me talking about how Air Traffic Control
and pilot starting to get into fights,
and I break down some of those videos,
I'll put a link to that video up here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.