Whoa!
Crap.
That kind of blows.
Kind of sounds like what the pilots are probably saying the flight deck right now
Viral debrief, episode 2
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.
After the original viral debrief, I had a lot of videos sent to my Instagram.
So, I want to thank you all for that. Some of
those videos are going to be in this series.
And if you have any videos that you want me to break down,
just go ahead and send them to my Instagram.
That's the easiest way right now for me to read them.
But for now, let's get into it.
No way!
Talk about a float, right?
How are you not going around right now?
Whoa!
Crap!
That kind of blows.
Kind of sounds like what the pilots are probably saying the flight deck right now.
Obviously, the pilots in this situation should have gone around.
They're either carrying too much speed as they're coming in or
they left the power in too long as they're floating down the runway.
But they did do a great job maintaining the center line with the wind swirling.
That's a very positive thing that they did well.
Also, I have never done this approach, I've seen
it a bunch of times, I realized it's very steep
I've never tried it but the new Microsoft Flight Sim game is coming out soon
and I will probably try that on the 747.
I'm just kind of curious to see if I can do it or not but...
Anyway, this approach coming in is a very steep approach it's not that easy to do
so, I’m not being critical of these pilots except for the fact that
they went way too far down the runway and should have gone up and tried it again.
Here is the biggest issue: these markers right here
on the runway are the thousand-foot markers
that actually what the airline pilots are shooting for when we're trying to land.
We're trying to get on that that gives us a little bit of protection behind us
and this pilot actually lands on the thousand-foot markers
but they're going the wrong direction.
And seeing those, they would know they only have a thousand feet left to stop
which isn't going to be enough room when you're
going downhill and fast which is what they're doing
and if you're wondering if they had their brakes on
notice these skid marks here.
When I rewind this, you're going to see they aren't there.
So, he's slamming on the brakes to try to get it to stop.
He's just going way too fast.
The other thing I notice here is, I don't know if he's contemplating going off to the side but
you see him drift to the side of the runway.
You see this little jet off here. It looks like he's about to shoot off that
but then he decides that he should just go off the end of the runway into the sand
which is the best choice instead of going off
what looks like it might be some type of a cliff.
I know that I had this experience sometimes when I was a newer pilot is that
you just want to land the plane especially if you're uncomfortable.
This is just poor decision making.
They got the plane lined up and things like that,
and they were going down the middle the runway which is good
but they should have seen how much runway they've chewed up
and realized there's no way for them to stop in
time with a plane of this size and that speed.
So, they should have gone around.
How fun would that be to do on one of your planes?
That's so cool.
I know that some of the upper management at the
airline that I work for watch my channel sometime.
So, if you're watching this
and you can figure out a way to safely attach rockets to a 747,
I say next year I go to the air show with one of
our planes we attach some rockets on the plane,
and we show the blue angels.
What's up.
Genius!
All right, so that's obviously never going to happen
but here's what's actually happening in this video here.
I know some of you are thinking this is an airshow stunt but
there's actually some practicality of what they're doing here.
In the 80s there was a secret mission that was organized flying c-130s
and they were going to use rockets as a way to extract hostages from Iran.
Here's some video of that plane that they were actually using.
What they were planning to do is use these rockets to actually slow down and stop
and then they were going to use rockets to actually vertically take off
from a soccer stadium.
As you can imagine, that was going to be very tricky.
Obviously, they had some very skilled pilots if they think
that they're going to land a plane inside a soccer stadium
being overweight and heavy and then fill it with a bunch of passengers and then
blast off basically vertically taking off a c-130 like this.
So, I think that's where all the actual original design started.
Now the government has that research that they did for that mission,
I guess they're using it on the air shows.
So, when my offer does stand to fly 747 for
my airline at an airshow with rockets attached,
I will not be doing it into a soccer stadium.
He's so lame.
That is so close.
They must be heavy.
If you ever go into long haul flying or flying heavier jets like a
747 or a triple seven or an A330,
there will be times that you're going to use a lot of runway.
However, you usually won't be going to the
very end of the runway like these pilots do.
They would barely clear the fence at a lot of airports.
There are several possible causes for using this much runway
which is probably too much runway but
here's what I think is going on.
I think they're overweight.
The first thing I want you to note here is that it's a cargo plane.
Note this big door here for freight to go in and out
and there's no windows for people to look out the window.
So, this is obviously a freighter.
Next you see how shallow the pitch angle is on rotation.
The pilot clearly needs to get off the ground
because they have no other choices but it isn't climbing.
So, they need to get the plane off the ground so it
can gain more speed so they can continue their climb.
You see the pitch angle even as they're continuing to fly is very shallow.
They're even blowing dirt on the ground below them
a long way past where they've actually taken off.
So, my guess is that they're overweight.
Airlines at haul freight get paid by the tonnage
by the weight that they're actually transporting.
So, in some countries, they will convince the pilots to take
on more weight than the plane is actually supposed to take on.
For obvious reasons, that's very dangerous.
There's a lot of risk and there are many accidents that
have thinking happened as a result of taking too much weight
thinking the plane can do it.
The reality is that you could probably fly a plane that's overweight.
That's happened, people have done it, people have gotten away with it.
But if you ever do that and someone finds out that you did that,
there's a good chance that you could lose your license.
So doing something like that for the risk of your life
and your license is usually not worth it.
Oh yeah. Somebody sent me this asking me how dangerous this actually was.
Obviously, that's a rain cloud or a rain shower that's happening there
and it's obviously pretty intense.
I know sometimes people that watch these videos who are scared of flying
see something like this and they wonder how safe is this.
Now every plane has its own noise though.
Obviously, I'm not sure exactly what the noise is for this particular plane.
So, I don't know what that noise exactly was.
Minimums, minimums.
That minimums call basically lets you know
that you're at the mims and you have to see
the runway or the approach lighting or things
like that to be able to continue to land.
The real risk of this actual flight here isn't necessarily the rain.
The planes are built and the engines are built to be able to fly through rain.
That's not the problem.
What the real risk is something called a "Microburst".
A Microburst is basically a bunch of air getting pushed down from the cloud.
It's a bunch of air getting pushed down
and what it can do is it can push down so heavily
that it can actually slam a plane into the ground.
On modern aircraft, there's actually technology where the
computer is processing all the different information that it's getting from outside.
So, it let the pilots know if they were encountering something like a Microburst.
With the crashes that happened in the 80s,
they wanted to create a technology to prevent
that from happening again in the future.
So, in this situation, they're flying into
what would probably be a pretty poor decision.
Sometimes it's hard to tell from just watching
the video just how strong is that rain.
I personally would wait five or ten minutes because something
that's that heavy of a downpour
is gonna probably move off the field within five to ten minutes
so, there's no reason to put yourself in a risk situation of
going down and hitting a microburst.
But again, I don't know what the radar looked like
or any of the other things and sometimes with a video it's a little hard to determine
exactly how heavy the rain is.
I don't know how low they were on gas but I would have
waited five or ten minutes before I shot that approach
and just let that cloud move off of the field
Oh! This went viral for sure.
Back when this first came out, I know some friends
that sent it to me and asked what was going on.
Man, if you're in the back of that plane you are just getting rocked back there.
They actually did a good job recovering it once they got straightened.
That could have ended a lot worse for sure.
You can see here the plane isn't lined up with the runway.
And that starts actually a little bit earlier.
You can see the upwind wing here is up
and the plane is getting pushed off the center line.
One of the strange things about flying a jumbo jet is that
when you're on the flight deck and you're flying into land,
you yourself are not supposed to be lined up with the runway.
You're supposed to have your mains lined up with the runway.
So, in some cases, you're actually feel like you're at the very far side of the runway
depending on how much your plane is at an angle as you're coming into land.
And that's something you need to learn when
you start flying large heavy jets like this,
You need to just think about overall the big picture
and you need to have your mains, the main tires in the middle of the runway
which is often if you're in a very heavy crab like
this is going to put you to the side of the runway.
You see here on the nose wheel it's lined up
which means the pilot is lining himself up with the center of the runway.
Which on a smaller plane works but on a big
plane like an A380 that's not going to work.
And you can see the mains here off to the downwind side.
Another issue you see is the pilot flares too early.
You can see that initial flare right here.
Typically, on a larger jet, you want to get a flare in about 30 feet.
Now, it's possible the plane was starting to sink on them too fast with high winds,
it can be a bit of a wrestling match to get planes onto the ground.
On these larger planes, you have a countdown system a cadence.
It will go 50 40 30 20 10.
If that cadence is going too fast, in some cases, pilots will pull back
a little bit add some power or do something to reduce
that sink rate into the ground to prevent the plane from slamming.
It has to be a very quick reaction though.
You have to add power and pull it back
so, it just gives a little burst of power which changes from the plane's thinking
to going forward so it decreases that descent rate into the ground
and prevents your plane from bouncing.
But it's very calculated. You have to be very smart about how fast and how much power you add and
how fast you pull it back.
It takes some practice to get good at it
but it'd be maybe what could be happening here I'm not 100 sure because
I can't see the flight deck video.
All right, they flared too early and they're
off their center line as they come into land.
Naturally, you're trying to get the aircraft back on the center line.
He drops his upwind wing down here
to get the plane back on the center line.
the problem is with the larger aircraft,
you can't get momentum moving left and right too fast
because momentum of this type of weight wants to keep going that direction.
And with the flare too high it causes the plane to bounce
so, you have momentum going to the right you have the plane bouncing
and look at the rudder here.
It's out from when he kicked out to go straight.
But now that the plane is up in the air again
it's going to help swing the tail around even more.
So, between the momentum, the rudder and the wheels being off the ground
it causes the whole back of the plane to jump to the side.
Now it's basically just a wrestling match to get it going back down the runway.
You can see the pilots dancing on the rudder
to get it from going back and forth because you have a lot of momentum
that's moving around back there.
Obviously, everything is deployed so they're not going to be
able to do a go around once they touch the ground like this.
They're not going to be able to do a go around.
Whoever is flying is doing a good job now that it's on the ground to keep it
from actually shooting off the side of the runway.
Because with how much momentum that's going, there could have easily been an
over-correction from one side of the runway or the other
and that over-correction would have thrown them into the grass.
As someone who's had more than their fair share of bad landings,
there's someone up here right now that's feeling very embarrassed.
However, something very important to remember is that not many people can say
they've disappointed 18 flight attendants at the exact same time.
Speaking about disappointing flight attendants,
if you haven't seen my series cockpit confessionals
I talk about all the crazy things that pilots and flight attendants do
while on a layover.
If you haven't seen that series,
I'll put a link to it right here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.