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.
I think by now all of you know what the Viral Debrief series is all about.
I want to thank all of you who have been sending me videos on my Instagram
and also on the 74 gear forum.
Thank you so much for sending those.
Honestly, without your help, there's no way I could be finding all these clips.
All right! Let's get into it!
Man!
What the pilot is trying to do here by adding power is
they're trying to actually slow down the rate of descent.
If you add the power, what it's going to do is instead of the plane sinking faster,
It's going to help push the plane forward.
By doing that, it's going to be a lot more gradual touch onto the water
and it's going to save it from slamming into the water like that.
Listen again when he starts to add the power.
If you've ever had a hard landing on a
passenger plane, that's basically what happened.
The pilots were very low on speed
and sometimes you'll hear them right before
touchdown they'll rev the engines up.
And the reason they're doing that is to help make the landing a lot smoother,
but in this case, the pilot didn't add power soon enough
so by not adding the power soon enough, it basically slammed into the water.
Had the pilot added power here about 10 or 20 feet earlier,
the landing would have been a lot smoother and the nose of where
the engine is probably wouldn't have broken off into the water.
I have been told by different pilots that do a lot of floatplane flying
that it is a lot harder to judge the distance from the ground
especially when the water is very calm.
Now, this water didn't look super calm but I've never landed on water so
I'll let you know if I ever do how hard it is.
What are you doing?
This is actually a really interesting one because it
looks like it's a student pilot and his flight instructor.
It looks like the student flares a little bit too early
and the instructor knows they're going to land hard so
he adds power to save the plane from slamming into the runway.
That's good. That's something that we all do during flight school.
Then the strange things start happening.
If you do a go-around, which is what a pilot should do when
you're aborting a landing which is what they're doing here,
and it's actually one of the first things we learn in flight school,
but something that's weird is that you would want to keep your wings level.
Why?
You want to get away from the ground as quickly as possible.
And keeping your wings level is going to allow you to do that.
The easiest way I can explain this to you is if you were
ever a kid and you put your whole hand out the window
and you kind of seesaw it up in the air through the wind when you're in the car,
it's kind of the same thing as a wing.
So if you imagine, if you have your whole hand out in the wind like this
hanging out the car, it's going to go up and down a lot.
And if you put out just two fingers for example,
and you didn't put it all the way out the window,
there's not a lot of air that's hitting your hand
so the impact that force your hand up or down is not very much.
So they're in this bank at a very low altitude
which, like I said, doesn't make a lot of sense
and then you'll notice the instructor pulls the power back here.
The thing that's strange is the only thing that's in front of them are trees.
They're not even going straight over the runway. They've turned for a set of trees.
That makes no logical sense whatsoever.
Especially at this low altitude, you'd want to get
up higher before you pulled the power back at all.
You see him look up right here and realize that they're basically tree level.
He gives full power but then again goes into a bank.
So he's reducing his ability to climb away from the ground.
By having your wings level, it's like having your whole hand out the window
and it helps your plane get away from the ground.
You'll notice in most cases when a pilot does
a go around, they go straight for a while.
Obviously, that doesn't work.
There's a mountain or something ahead of you because
you're never going to win against a mountain.
Challenge accepted!
But in most cases, you'll see at most airports,
the go-around procedure,
the pilots fly straight for a while to at least
get away from the ground and then they turn.
You see here, he's in the bank and he hits
an angle that's too steep to create any lift
and then the instructor pulls back on the stick right here.
Watch.
They're going too slow so he stalls the aircraft.
Falls out of the sky
and he's already almost inverted.
So by pulling it back, he's actually pulling
the plane into the ground even faster.
This is really just poor airmanship.
Unfortunately, the flight instructor should have been
protecting the student pilot and made better choices
because this totally did not need to happen this way.
This one got sent to me a lot the last couple weeks.
Pull the power.
Stomp on the breaks.
Right now.
You'd be fine.
Man!
This one got sent to me a lot on Instagram this last couple weeks.
The pilot lands to the left of the centerline
which you can see right here.
Which by itself is not a big deal.
I've done it literally a hundred times in flight school.
Then, he lets the aircraft drift to the left side of the runway.
That's not good but again not terrible.
You can just get on the other rudder and steer it back to the middle of the runway.
But instead, he chooses to do a go-around.
The problem is the plane's not going fast enough to get up in the air.
But the pilot pulls the yoke all the way back into his chest
without getting in all the aerodynamics of how a plane flies
by pulling back on the yoke like this at this slow speed,
he's actually increasing the distance that
it's going to take to takeoff off the ground.
As he goes off the runway over the grass,
the pilot here is using his yoke which
he is trying to turn like it's a steering wheel
by doing that, he is again preventing his plane from getting off the ground.
On most small planes and on some large
planes, you steer the plane with your feet.
On big planes like a 747 or most any commercial jet,
there's something else called a tiller that helps the pilot steer.
But on almost every plane, you're going to use your feet to turn left or right.
Not the yoke.
Right here, if he had just pulled the power
all the way back and stomped on the brakes
and just steered away from the hangar,
he would have had a lot of explaining to do but he would have been fine.
Instead, he doesn't make any changes.
And then he drives it right into a hangar.
These are some pictures here of the incident
and luckily the man of this video was okay.
The plane, not so much.
So him having the yoke yanked back and turned all the way to the right,
is really only hurting his ability to get up in the air.
And even if he did get in the air with how much he has
it turned, he would just slap his wing on the ground so,
it wouldn't do him any good.
I've said this in a lot of videos and some people criticize me for it,
but if your plane is not giving you what you want,
it's important that you do something else.
So this guy is obviously wanting to get up in
the air and he's wanting to turn to the right.
But instead of doing something different, he just keeps holding
it and turning it more and it's not giving him what he wants.
Obviously, if he had pulled the power or done a lot of different
things, he could have prevented the situation from happening
but instead, he had a little bit of a sensory overload
and he just flew into the building.
Oh my god!
So close!
Man, he almost smashed his nose in.
Put your gear up!
Everybody forgets. I do too.
Everybody forgets to put their gear up on a go-around.
This is actually a great example of a gusty weather go-around.
These pilots did a really good job.
This nose over that happened right before touchdown,
that is very dangerous.
Most pilots at this level of experience that
are flying a large wide-body aircraft like this
know that you can't nose an aircraft over and have the nose hit the ground.
By doing that, it would probably crumple the nose gear.
The planes are designed to land on their main.
So this is probably the pilot wrestling to get it on the ground
or maybe a reduction in power causing the nose to go over
but most pilots know that by hitting the nose first,
it would cause a very serious accident.
As they're coming in here, you can see this windsock is fully extended.
It's moving left and right.
And that motion that you're seeing there on that windsock is
what the pilots are dealing with as they're coming into land.
Obviously, the pilots aren't looking at that.
They're looking at the runway but this gives you an idea
of what they're dealing with when they're coming in.
Once the pilots realize they're not going to be able to safely land
they executed go-around,
and as I mentioned in the video, a go-around is not
something that we typically do on a regular basis,
and you're overloaded with tasks.
You're letting Air Traffic Control know what's going on,
you're paying attention to everything
and sometimes what happens is you forget to put the gear up.
And that's myself included.
I've forgotten.
In these gusty conditions like this, it's a wrestling match.
I'm sure you've seen videos on Youtube or Instagram
where the pilots are moving the power, and the yoke or the controls around a lot
in order to get it onto the ground.
It's a bit of a wrestling match.
So it's definitely part of being a pilot and as the plane gets bigger,
you obviously have more momentum and more things that are going on.
It takes some practice to get used to it.
Too fast.
Oh no!
This is actually something really funny to watch.
It's called "Porpoising" and almost every pilot's done it.
It says in the video that was filmed in 2006
but it looks like was filmed in some 1980's camp quarter.
It usually happens in flight schools.
In my experience, it's a result of the pilots coming in too fast
and the plane wanting to continue to fly.
If you ever go sit in an airport with student pilots,
you will definitely see this if you spend enough time out there.
Now, I don't think I've ever porpoise an aircraft this bad
but I definitely did it once in flight school.
As soon as a plane starts to porpoise, especially if you're a newer pilot,
the best thing you can do is do a go-around,
come back around and try it again.
Usually, it is only going to get worse and it's
a lot easier to explain why you did a go-around
than why you tried to save a bad landing
because that bad landing usually can result in a lot more of
a dangerous situation like what you saw happen in this video
and poor judgment is not something that anybody at your
flight school, your examiners, nobody wants to see.
So be better to do a go-around, come around and try to do another landing.
Once you start porpoising, it only gets worse.
And then you're going to be slowing down,
getting back up in the air again even higher
with less momentum and less speed.
So it's very easy to lose altitude and slam on the ground.
And you see here,
that's exactly what he does.
You see right here where he starts to flare
and then the plane wants to go back up in the air again?
That's indicating that the plane is coming in too fast and he flares too much.
When he pulls back like that
the plane has so much speed.
It wants to go back up in the air again.
Then you see him coming back toward the runway
with the nose pointed down at the ground.
And then he doesn't flare right here.
You can see the nose of the aircraft is hitting before the main tires.
If you're ever flying in a larger aircraft and you do what you saw in this video
where the landing nose first,
it happens sometimes.
An example that comes to mind is a few years back in New York
at LaGuardia, Southwest had a situation where they landed with the nose down first
and it crumpled the nose.
It's a great example of landing on the nose and why you should never do it.
The alternative, if you had to land no matter what,
you had to land for whatever reason, your plane was
on fire and you were porpoising down the runway,
what you can do is add a little bit of power,
level off the plane and then try to get back in and land at a normal descent rate.
If you do what these guys are doing which are just trying
to get the plane back on the ground with no extra energy,
It's exactly what you saw, is what's going to happen.
So if you have a long enough runway and you have to get on the ground,
add some power, level off
then pull the power and come in at just a normal descent that you would normally do,
and that will stop the porpoising from happening.
But, if you are a new pilot and you're anywhere in training,
the best thing to do is if you can go-around, go-around
and then come around and do it again.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.