Viral Debrief.
Coming up.
Hey, 74 crew! Welcome back!
If you don't know me, my name's Kelsey.
I'm a 747 pilot.
My channel 74 gear is all about aviation.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of you in the 74 crew
for sending these videos to me.
Via my Instagram or on 74gear.com.
I appreciate you all so much.
You all know what you're here for.
Let's get into it!
That's never good.
Just come, hold the plan.
The brake's locked.
Just come, hold the plan.
So it doesn't flip over.
First, this is a great example about not crying over spilled milk.
The damage is done. There's nothing you can do.
And this guy is way more calm than a lot of people would be
after having this happen to their aircraft.
This is called a Tailwheel or a Taildragger,
and they are great planes
but there are some unique challenges when you fly one of these.
You'll see, as he adds power, the tail comes up
which on a high-performance Taildragger like this, is not uncommon at all,
One of the risks of having an aircraft like this though,
is if you stomp on the brakes, the propeller is gonna go into the dirt.
These are great planes to fly,
especially doing Bush flying, which means you're flying out in remote locations
where there's not a normal airport.
And I don't have any experience doing Bush flying.
I have flown a TailDragger. One of these types of planes.
I do have an endorsement to fly one of those.
It was a long time ago, but when you're doing Bush flying,
you're flying on remote places,
which is like a, could be a, just a random lakebed or anything.
You can go land these types of aircraft just about anywhere,
which makes that type of flying really, really fun.
Now there's really not much debrief on here because with the brakes locking up,
there was only really two options, which I'm gonna break down.
The first thing that he could have done to prevent this
would've been to pull the power right away.
The problem is that everything's happening very quickly.
So it's taking you a second to analyze what's going on.
"Am I on a rock? What's happening?"
So if you had pulled the power, what would've happened
is the tail would've went back down the ground.
Would've realized probably the brake was set
and then he could have taken off like normal.
That's the first option.
The second option would've been, of course, to release the parking brake.
The thing is that usually as an airplane pilot,
you spend a couple of seconds trying to figure out what's going on.
You're typically not in a two or three second
have to make an immediate decision situation
When there's something that's not how it's supposed to be.
Usually, you have a couple seconds or a minute or longer
to analyze what's happening.
In this case, he didn't really have that long.
As soon as the tail went up and with all the power in there,
that thing was gonna flip over,
especially when he started rolling forward,
it started getting that momentum moving,
and then the brakes grabbed like that.
He was gonna tip over.
There really wasn't a lot of time to make that decision and go
pull the power or to release the brakes.
So that obviously he didn't realize the brakes were set.
Helicopter pilots, on the other case, maybe it has been faster to react to this
because when they're flying and they lose their engine,
they have to react immediately.
They do something called an auto rotation.
I did a video about it a while back
and I was talking to a helicopter friend of mine. He said:
"Yeah! Now, when we're doing training, there's no analyzed time.
You see it and you immediately react to it".
Whereas an airplane pilot, it's a little different.
You want to see the situation and analyze what's going on
before you make any rash movements.
When you're flying a plane, you have that time to evaluate everything
and you don't wanna do something really quickly,
because, in some cases, you may make a mistake
or make the situation worse.
Whereas a helicopter pilot, this is according to my friend,
said: "You don't really have the time to analyze that.
As soon as you know that engine's going, you've gotta start going down right away."
So it's kind of a difference between the two.
In this case, I would like to say an experienced pilot would go:
"Oh, I'll do this. I'll pull the power."
The reality is as you watch this and you think: "Oh, I would be able to do that".
It happens very quickly.
So, never say never.
Well, this takeoff actually went really well.
All considering the circumstances of what's happening.
What I think that noise that you're hearing is,
is a compressor stall.
I'm gonna play it again so that way,
if you ever hear it, you'll know what that noise is.
Without boring you with all the details, a compressor stall is basically
those fans that you see there,
those fans that you see at the very beginning of a turbine engine,
there's multiple sets of those.
And behind each set, they're compressing the air more and more.
So if there is something to impact one of those fans
and interrupt that airflow that's going back there,
you can get a compressor stall, meaning the airflow is being interrupted.
Now, that can be caused by something on the runway,
but based off of the altitude that they were at,
when this started to happen, I'm guessing, the engine ingested a bird.
If you ingest a bird big enough, it's going to possibly cause a stall.
Some engines are able to eat a bird.
I've had engines, eat a bird and there was no problem with it.
But it depends on the size of the bird, the type
of the engine and all those types of things.
But in this case, it sounds like he probably ate a bird.
It messed up the fans, that created a stall.
And then you heard that pounding,
that popping noise.
That sounds like a compressor stall.
Now there's two different types of compressor stalls
that you may experience as a passenger.
One, that is gonna be the most violent that you're going to feel the most,
is when the engines are at a very power setting, which they would be for takeoff.
And when you're at a very low altitude, because the air is a lot more dense.
When you're at that low altitude high power setting
and that compressor all starts pounding there.
What you're going to have is the whole plane is gonna be vibrating.
It's gonna be very loud. Everybody's gonna be very uncomfortable.
On the other side, if you were at a very high altitude
and a normal cruise power setting,
it wouldn't be nearly as violent as what you were seeing in this case here.
The easiest way to explain it is
imagine if you were driving your car
and you were just redlining and driving it as hard as you could go,
and then you blew your engine out.
It would be a lot more noticeable than if you were
driving around like a little grandma, right?
If you're driving around like a little grandma, your engine may die
but it wouldn't be this big, massive explosion or this big loss of power.
So because you're not asking the same for your engine.
I guess that's kind of the easiest way to explain it
if you've never experienced something like this.
Here's something I find kind of funny though.
As someone who sits next to people who are scared a lot when they're flying,
I don't know why I'm always sitting next to them.
But you can hear this person scream as they took off.
But then there's not a peep from them.
when the compressor stall starts happening.
I have no clue. Maybe they passed out or something,
but as you can see, the plane continued to climb
and then they started turning around to go back towards the airport.
The thing to remember on aircraft is that everything is redundant.
So you have two engines as a redundancy.
One engine fails, the other engine is just fine to carry you
and have you fly back around and land.
Really, your only concern is if you hit birds on both engines
and you hear that coming from both engines,
then what you're hoping for is that you have this guy
up there on the flight deck with you.
I have done a lot of dumb things in aviation.
I've made a lot of mistakes, but luckily one
thing I've never done is have a prop strike.
Because hearing that blade hit the ground for me is like fingernails on a chalkboard.
It is just so painful.
The thing that surprises me though,
and the thing that really I would never want
is if I had a prop strike, would be to have a picture that says:
"Kelsey's prop strike" and then load that on the internet.
The other thing that I'm thankful for
is that they didn't write Marcy's first prop strike,
meaning they're expecting her to have more after this.
I'm guessing that she was probably on her first solo
or one of her first flights,
because after you get, you know, 40-50 hours in a flying,
nobody's coming out to record you anymore.
Nobody's impressed with your fact that you're flying a plane.
So I'm guessing this is probably very early on in her aviation career.
And she almost had a great landing.
Look right here.
You see she's making a great approach,
but then right here at the final part,
she fails to pull the nose high enough up in the air.
You'll notice on the replay that she hits one tire down first.
And that's really not a big deal.
If your mains don't touch at the same time,
that's not a problem.
But when all three touch and hit at the same time,
that can be an issue.
And you see, she gets back up in the air again.
And then, hits the nose first on the next touchdown.
And that's where the problem gets really bad.
As mostly you know, you never wanna have the
nose of your aircraft ever touchdown first,
it happened to me when I was in flight school.
I porpoise.
Luckily, when it happened to me,
I was with the flight instructor and we went back up in the air again.
The thing is,
for those of you that haven't experienced that,
there's a lot that's going on.
And your brain is trying to process so much information at the same time.
So once that starts happening, if you haven't seen that before,
you don't really know how the maneuver is to handle it.
So it happened to me.
Luckily I was with my flight instructor. We went back up in the air again.
We came back in and tried landing again.
And during that time, he explained to me what was going on
and how to remedy that.
But it's something you are probably gonna end up seeing at some point in your career,
especially if you're going through flight school and end up being instructor,
you're gonna end up seeing this happen.
And then, you're gonna know how to handle it.
What you should have done in this situation is pulled back on the nose.
If she had pulled back on the nose, the plane
would've hit the mains on the ground first
and she could have just held it there
and then set the nose down.
And it would've been totally fine.
She wouldn't had a prop strike.
However, if you start to do this porpoise, it's always best to take the safest option,
which is just give power, go up around and try it again.
Because if you've never seen something or you're uncomfortable with something,
or it feels out of control,
that's always the best decision.
Go around, try it again.
Usually, you have enough gas to spend an hour trying to get the right landing.
If you don't feel comfortable about what's going on.
The winds, it's gusty, you're on the wrong side.
You're landing at the very edge of the runway, all those situations.
And I've done literally all of them.
You're just gonna go around and come back and try it again.
So in this case here, where she started to porpoise
probably after that second one where it touched nose first,
she just should have just added power and
got back up and come around and try it again.
However, I know some of you are gonna say:
"Oh, how could she have saved it?"
So right here, if she had pulled the nose back a little bit,
the mains would've just settled right in
the bouncing would've stopped and she could have set the nose down,
but she didn't.
I think she just left it in kind of a neutral situation,
which then made the porpoising just get worse and worse as it went down the runway.
And then she had the prop strike.
For those of you that end up deciding to become a pilot,
there's something called a sight picture.
And that's the perspective that you see as a pilot.
And it's something that takes time to learn,
to know what you should be seeing as far as what your pitch angle is.
Because you can't look at your instruments and see what angle are you at.
You're just gonna have to train your brain that this is what I want to be seeing.
And that takes time, unfortunately.
For Marcy, in this situation.
It takes time to know what that should look like.
And like I said,
if she's doing her solo and probably anywhere in her first 40 hours,
that's not enough time to always know what the right pitch angle should look like
for every situation.
Now on a 747, that pitch angles different
than on a small Cessna or any other small aircraft.
And I will tell you,
usually, in training, your flight instructors will say:
"Look at the end of the runway".
And that's a habit that I developed somewhere in flight school.
And I never really thought about it.
I always looked at the end, always looked at the end,
but one of the first times I was flying the 747,
the first couple times that I landed were at nighttime or in a crosswind.
So I was so focused on what was going on.
I wasn't really bothering to look around,
but as I started to get comfortable, probably
in the first maybe a hundred hours of flying,
I was coming into the land and I heard the countdown.
We have 50, 40, 30 countdown that tells us how far from the ground we are.
When I heard 30,
I looked over the nose to see how far up in the air we were.
And it was weird. I was like:
"No, there's no way that we're 30 feet up in the air".
And then I started getting distracted to what I should have been doing,
which was flying the plane.
The landing was not that great.
Wasn't terrible, but it wasn't that great.
And I remember thinking: "Okay,
this is why you don't look over the nose, Kelsey.
You've never done that.
Why are you doing that?"
So now as I fly, I'm looking forward,
but what your flight instructors will tell you when you're flying a small plane.
And it's what you do when you're flying a 747 too.
You look forward, you look at the end of the runway.
So overall, she actually did a really good job.
Again, she's probably a new pilot
and this is definitely a mistake she'll never make again.
We go.
Now I have done this as well on a big jet.
And I can tell you, it's equally as uncomfortable
as when you're flying in a small plane
and you start to porpoise,
this is equally as uncomfortable.
And I'm gonna tell you what happened here.
You'll notice as they're coming in here, it's all normal.
But right before the touchdown, you see the plane goes back up in the air,
which is definitely not the desired effect from what you want during your flare.
And now it takes a lot of work to save this landing.
And you're going to eat up a bunch of extra runway.
And the mistake that most people make is they pull back on the nose even more,
which can cause a tail strike.
Obviously, if you float too far down the runway
and you're out of the touchdown zone,
well, then you have to do a go round and come back in and try it again.
The two things that typically cause the situation are,
the pilots are coming in too fast
or they flare too much.
I would guess in this case,
is that the pilot was coming in and keeping too much speed.
With having too much speed as you come into land there,
when you carry that speed and you go for the flare at that altitude
that you normally flare at,
then what's gonna happen is the plane's gonna go:
"Oh, you wanna go back and fly again? Because you have too much speed".
So then what happens is that the plane starts to go back up in the air.
Then you saw them kind of level off right there.
And so what happens,
that's the first situation that can cause that.
The second situation is you flare too much.
You put too much flare.
Then the plane wants to go back up in the air.
But typically as a pilot, once you get on these types of planes,
you develop a muscle memory.
Your body knows: "Hey, I need a flare this much"
And you just kind of have a set muscle memory
and a set site picture that you're looking at.
The only problem is the speed.
That's my guess on what happened here.
Is that they had too much speed coming in.
And then when they pulled it up, they started to go back up in the air.
Again, the biggest risk you have on these larger aircraft
and when you start pulling the nose back more
to prevent porpoising, which typically doesn't happen on commercial jets.
But then you have the risk of having a stall or a tails strike.
You see the wings rocking back and you see how high the nose is up in the air?
But then you'll notice right here that nose
actually gets pushed over to avoid the tails strike
And had they just goosed the throttle
just given a little bit of power and pulled it back out.
They would've reduced the impact and the downward trajectory
and landed on the ground more smoothly.
I don't recommend doing that however
because if you add the power and then you start floating even more,
you can eat up a lot of runway.
And if it's not something you're experienced in doing,
you may end up eating a bunch more runway,
then trying to land, then going off the end of the runway, all that stuff.
In this case, you know, the triple seven is obviously a very robust aircraft.
It can take a very hard landing.
So it's not a big deal.
And they're gonna fall from about 10 feet.
If the plane were to just run out of energy
and they ran out of energy, but luckily they got the nose over.
But if they run out of energy,
at, five, ten feet, it's gonna be a hard landing,
but the plane can take that.
If you add a bunch of power and go off the end of the runway,
it's a little bit harder to explain.
Now, had Marcy done this, where she just pulled the yolk back
and just landed like that?
Again, it would've been a hard landing, but she would've landed on the ground.
And I don't know about this pilot or what their experience is
or what their background end is.
But it's typical as a pilot in this situation,
you start to float like that.
You just wanna pull back and get the mains on.
The problem is you start pulling back more and more
trying to get the mains to touch on the ground.
And then you're at risk of hitting your tail on the ground.
Now, if you wanna see some more of these Viral Debriefs,
check out this video right here.
And if you want to hear about some of the crazy things that crew members do,
while we're on our layovers,
check out this video up here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.