Catch me if you can.
Hollywood versus reality.
We'll be traveling at 6,000 miles per hour
at an altitude of 300 feet.
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
Today, I'm here in Charleston, South Carolina
And you know the drill, in Charleston,
our hotel looks over a pool
so I can't really show you the video outside my hotel room but
that's where I'm at.
An interesting fact about Charleston, South Carolina
Frank Abagnale, who this Catch me if you can movie is based on his life,
he currently lives here in Charleston.
I have not run across him but he currently lives here.
Most of you already know that this movie is based off of a true story.
It's starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio
and of course both of them do an amazing job in this film.
If you haven't already seen the movie,
I'll put a link to it down below in the description.
This film takes place during the Golden Age of aviation, the 60s and the 70s.
And a lot consider that to be one of the best times
to be part of a flight crew and cabin crew.
So this movie needs no introduction.
Let's get into it!
You look too young to be a pilot.
I'm a co-pilot.
Why so nervous?
How do you feel if you lost your uniform first week on the job?
Relax!
Pan Am has got lots of uniforms.
It's gonna be $164.
Great. I'll write you a check.
Sorry, no checks, no cash.
You'll have to fill in your employee I.D. number. I'll bill Pan Am.
They'll take it out of your next paycheck.
Even better.
The first thing that caught my eye was that
Leonardo only has two stripes on his jacket.
Now, in some countries, they have something called a second officer
which means that they are a crews relief.
Which means on a very long flight, they all will do is work the radios
and hit some buttons and cruise.
They don't do anything for the takeoff and the landing.
However, Leonardo refers to himself as a co-pilot
which is not a term that we currently use now but
it usually indicates that he is a first officer.
So that was just a little Snafu I noticed
but he only has two instead of three.
The other people that you'll see that have two now,
sometimes flight attendants will have two.
In some airlines, I've seen flight attendants where
they have a jacket and they have two stripes.
But pilots now don't have two stripes unless they're a second officer
which only is in some countries.
The second part when he is talking with him about taking the money out of his paycheck,
that's actually true and that's how it works today.
In most cases what you have, is a budget that
you're allowed to spend on uniform parts.
It could be two three four hundred dollars. It really depends on your airline.
And you can spend that on whatever you want.
It could be shirts or pants or a jacket or whatever you want
but that is actually true, that's how it works.
They take it out of your paychecks
so how they were talking about it then, about it coming out of your paycheck
is still how it works today.
Now, something that is accurate for this time period
but is not how it works today is
you don't have somebody that's tailoring your uniform.
In most cases, you're ordering a uniform
and you'll have to go get it tailored yourself.
Now, Pan Am was kind of like Emirates is today
which they're very conscious about image quality.
So, it possible that at this time frame
that you would go and have a tailor actually tailor your suit.
Now, when you get your pants,
you'll have to go to your own tailor and tailor them yourself.
All right! Let's get back to the film.
Hello.
Hi. Are you deadheading?
What?
Are you my deadhead to Miami?
Yes, yes, yeah.
Yeah, I'm the deadhead.
Here you go.
You're a little late, but the jump seat is open.
It's been a while since I've done this. Which one is the jump seat again?
Have a nice flight.
Well, he has three stripes now
so maybe they put the third stripe on after he left the tailor.
I don't know.
Another thing that's really cool is that where is this taking place.
Looks like JFK.
It's an old TWA hotel that they've been renovating
and I think it's open now.
It's really cool.
I haven't had a chance to check it out but I've heard from a few people.
It's really cool.
The biggest Hollywood thing about this scene is
actually how they're confusing two words
that are often messed up.
Deadheading and jump seating.
So she asks him: "Are you deadheader?"
Are you my deadhead to Miami?
Now, what the term deadhead means is
when your company is moving you from one location to another location
because they need you to get there,
that is a deadhead.
In this case, it seems like Frank is going to Miami because he wants to go there.
That's called jump seating.
So they confuse these two words because if he was a dead header,
he would be walking up, he'd have a positive space seat
and he would go fly it like any other passenger.
A lot of times, you'll see on my Instagram, I talked about: "Oh, I'm on a deadhead"
and it's abbreviated DH.
And you'll see that sometimes I put that on my Instagram
and people say: "Well, what's a deadhead".
That's what a deadhead is.
It's usually when the company needs me to get to a different city,
they'll put me on an aircraft as a passenger and they'll fly me there.
The term jump seat is what's used when
I want to go somewhere on my own on my free time.
So in a case where I finish work and I'm ready to go somewhere and visit friends,
I will jump seat.
And that means where I fly for free if there's a spot available,
I can catch a flight.
So now when you see those posts on my Instagram
saying I'm on a deadhead going to Japan
that's what I'm talking about.
Now, when you deadhead you don't ride on the flight deck.
You ride as a passenger in the back like I said earlier.
So the fact that he's going actually go on his free time
means if there's not a seat available in the back,
he'll ride up on the flight deck.
That's called the jump seat.
That seat that you sit in is called the jump seat
and the act of doing this traveling for free on your own is called jump seating.
Another thing that people have asked me about is when you're deadheading
Can you ride on the jump seat?
And, no, you can't.
The only scenario that you're allowed to ride on the flight deck
is when there are no extra seats available in the back.
And for the most part, no airline pilot is gonna ask to sit in that seat
because it's very uncomfortable.
The only scenario might be if it's a friend of yours that's flying
or some guys that you really want to talk to.
You might sit up there.
But the seats are a lot less comfortable than even the passenger seats in the back
and I know that's hard to believe
for some of you that have ridden coach on a very long flight,
you think this is the worst possible seat.
Trust me, that seat, the jump seat up there on the flight deck,
is worst, it's very small there's no support.
A lot of times your legs have no room to stretch out at all
and you also need permission to go to the bathroom.
So it's definitely worse.
That being said, I know a lot of aviation enthusiasts
would pay a lot of money to sit up there.
So it all depends on what you think.
Okay. Let's get back to Catch me if you can.
Are you my deadhead?
Frank, Captain Oliver.
John Larkin, the copilot.
Fred Tulley, flight engineer.
Frank Taylor, Pan Am. Thanks for giving me a lift, boys.
Go ahead and take a seat, Frank. We're about to push.
What kind of equipment you on, DC-8?
707.
You turning around on the red eye?
I'm jumping puddles for the next few months,
trying to earn my keep running leap frogs for the weak and weary.
No shame in that.
We all did it.
Something that's very Hollywood in this scene is
that both the pilots are already wearing their shoulder harnesses.
I've talked about it many times before but while you're on the ground,
pilots never wear those. They're not very comfortable.
It's hard to move and get things.
So you never wear your shoulder harnesses and honestly after takeoff,
like you saw in the Sully movie that I did, the Hollywood vs. reality on
shortly after takeoff, most pilots take their shoulder harnesses off
because at that point, you don't really need them.
Next you see Leonardo actually looking around for where the jump seat is.
I know it seems crazy but on every plane it's different,
and sometimes you have to hit a button to release it
so it's kind of an interesting thing
because I've been there trying to get a jump seat out
and I can see everybody on the plane looking at me
and it feels awkward like:
"Yeah, I fly a 200 million dollar plane
but I can't figure out how to work this seat".
And honestly, it happens a lot more than you might think.
What happens is when you get up there,
the pilots will ask something like "Are you familiar?"
And that's basically asking how familiar are you
with the flight deck of this aircraft.
As far as for the emergency exits,
how the jump seat works and all of those things.
If you're not familiar, then you decide
no, I've never been on this flight deck before or
I haven't been here for a while.
And they'll give you a quick briefing of all the things that you need to know
and one of them is how to get the seat out,
how to stow the seat in the case that you need to evacuate.
It's really important that, if you've never been up there before,
that you tell them you've never been up there before
because it gets very embarrassing
if you say that you've been there before and you know how it all works
and then you can't figure it out.
I mean, I've never done it but a friend told me about it.
Okay, let's get back to the movie.
Have a seat. - Thank you.
Would you like a drink after takeoff?
Milk?
80 knots, check.
V1 rotate.
V2, positive rate.
Gear up.
Dear Dad, today was graduation.
I am now a copilot, earning $1,400 a month, plus benefits.
And the best part is,
they tell me my family can fly for free.
So the call-outs that you hear the pilots making are actually pretty accurate.
Those are still calls or variations of calls that we still do use to this day.
So Hollywood obviously did some research on that to get that right.
Something that I was laughing about, however,
was that he was talking about how he's making $1400 a month.
Now, in the 60s and the 70s, that was probably a lot of money.
What I'm laughing about is in the 90s and 2000's pilots were still making,
in some cases, only that amount of money
and instead of being excited writing home saying "I'm making this much money"
pilots were writing home saying "I'm only making this much money".
Please send me some food.
It's funny because it's true.
Now something that's in here that I've never seen before,
and maybe some of the aviation enthusiasts know
there's too little mirror looking things
that are sitting up on the upper part of the dash.
Now I've never seen those before but maybe some of the aviation enthusiasts
can tell me down below in the comments section what those are
because I have no idea.
And you also saw what I was talking about in an earlier scene about the seat
being hidden inside that little closet.
It would be a little bit hard for you to find that if you didn't know where it was
and once you're up there on the flight deck of another aircraft of another airline,
it's kind of like being a guest in someone's home.
You're not just gonna start rifling through all their stuff
so usually you'll kind of just wait and let them show you where it is
like what happened there.
But, that is actually pretty accurate to how it would happened
except that wouldn't be the flight attendants
that would usually come up and do it for you.
One of the other pilots would tell you how to get it out.
Okay, Let's get back to Catch me if you can.
Thank you all very much for coming.
At the end of the day, I'll be choosing eight young ladies
to be a part of... Pan Am's future stewardess flight crew program.
These eight young ladies will accompany me on a two-month
public relations tour through Europe.
They will discover firsthand what it takes to be a Pan American stewardess.
What qualifies me to be a future stewardess?
Well, I think that I'm really friendly
and I can really help out and make people feel welcome on the plane.
We'll be traveling at 6,000 miles per hour, at an altitude of 300 feet.
Music was muted by YouTube
Music "Come fly with me" by: Frank Sinatra.
I you play that song at home while you watch, it's almost as good.
I don't make these rules...
I am just trying to make the best Hollywood vs Reality videos I can.
Well, this is the end of the song now.
Did you see that blonde out front?
I should have been a pilot.
Exactly.
For those of you that are planning to be flight attendants in the future
and obviously in this film, they're calling them stewardesses
because that was what they were called back in the day,
but they still do those large group interviews like what they're showing there.
And while I've never participated in a flight attendant interview process,
I did find it funny that the flight attendant was making an announcement:
We'll be traveling at 6,000 miles per hour, at an altitude of 300 feet.
Now even if she were to reverse the numbers that she said,
306,000 and they were to be doing 300 knots at 6,000 feet,
that would still be pretty impressive.
Not as impressive as 6,000 knots at 300 feet,
but you get the point.
As the part as for walking through the terminal having people stare at you,
that's not as common now as it used to be.
It does happen a lot more I find when I'm overseas
even domestically inside the US, so I do see it from time to time.
Sometimes as I'm walking with a group of flight attendants,
you'll see people that are looking over
and smiling. You kind of see that look in their eye like
"Man, that's something I'd really like to have done".
And usually it's from older people that remember that golden era of aviation.
It's definitely not today as glamorous as it was during this time the 60s and the 70s
when Pan Am was doing everything.
But at the end of the day, it beats most any other job.
I do find though for sure in a lot of countries,
sometimes in Asia or even South America,
that the way they treat you as a crew member is significantly better
when they know that you're crew.
There, there is still that idea of how cool
and how amazing it is to be part of a flight crew.
And it's really nice to be treated that way
because it gives me a little taste of what it used to be like
for these pilots and these flight attendants back in the 60s and the 70s.
It's my understanding that Frank,
the guy who Leonardo DiCaprio is portraying in this movie,
actually did that group interview and
actually took a group of eight over to Europe
and honestly that is so baller.
That is so baller.
Good for you, Frank!
Good for you!
Something else that caught my eye which isn't really a Hollywood thing but
Leonardo now has four stripes on his jacket.
That signifies that he is now a captain.
And back in this era,
usually you weren't getting very, very young captain's at the airlines
not like you're seeing now because of such a heavy pilot shortage.
At this time, you wouldn't get somebody usually that young as a captain,
at a big airline like that.
Now, this next scene is towards the end of the movie after they've caught Leonardo
for doing all the things that he shouldn't have been doing
and he's on his way back to the U.S. to face trial.
Carl.
You have to remember to let me call my father when we land.
I want to talk to him before he sees me on television or something like that.
Carl, look. That's LaGuardia right there.
Runway 44.
Okay, I had a pause it really quick.
There is no such thing as runway 44.
How it works is the runways to have numbers
based on the compass heading of that runway.
For example, if your plane was landing to the north,
it would have runway 36.
Meaning, it's landing directly to the north.
Or directly to the south runway 18
Or to the east or to the west.
And it's going to have a numbers of anything like that
so you could have runway 77 or runway 27
but you can't have runway 44.
So that's just something, I don't know, you could use as a party trick
if people are talking about the different runways but
it's all based on the compass heading of that specific runway.
And over time, as the compass changes,
sometimes they'll actually change the number of that runway.
Another thing that it just funny is that I find it so interesting that in real life,
this individual is able to portray being an airline pilot and fly and trick cruise,
flight attendants and pilots that he was actually a pilot.
And I find that pretty funny because when I started this channel, if you're newer,
when I started this channel, I had a lot of messages saying
"That guy's not a real pilot, he's a liar, he's a fake".
And I find it just amazing that in real life,
this guy was able to go out there and convince
that many people to let him fly for free
and travel all around the world.
I realized it was a different era and
people were more honest during that time period
but I just find it so amazing.
Okay, last scene of Catch me if you can.
You'll have to take your seat, sir.
I've told you twice.
We're landing. All of you.
Frank! Come on now.
Frank!
We're landing in six minutes. You need to be in your seats.
Frank, open the door!
Frank!
Frank! Frank!
God Almighty.
There is a way to actually unlock those doors from the outside
without busing it in and possibly squishing the person that's in there.
I'm not gonna tell you how to do it
because I don't wanna be responsible for
someone getting their bathroom break interrupted but
there is a way to have that done.
The scene with him climbing down the toilet is pretty Hollywood though.
I don't know the schematics of this aircraft and how it works
but for example in a 747, that does not work.
This is what the inside of the wheel well looks like on a Boeing 747.
I don't have the courage or the drive to rip off the toilet seat
because I am not interested to see what's down there
and I think it would be totally disgusting.
However, on a 747, you'll just have to take my word for it,
there is no way to climb through and down into the wheel well.
They are not connected.
I've done so many aviation movie starring Tom Hanks.
I hope he enjoys these if he ever watches them.
If you haven't seen the Hollywood versus reality that I did
on the film Cast away,
starring Tom Hanks
when his plane crashes into the ocean,
I'll put a link to it right here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up!