A YouTuber family survived a plane crash and they caught it all on video.
So, you know I had to cover it.
Viral Debrief.
Relax, relax!
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've been sent this video several times
and despite this family being kind of beat up after the plane crash,
they all survived.
But there's some really cool things in here I wanna show you.
Let's get into it!
Jaz.
How do you feel when you get up into the plane?
Be honest.
Be honest with my fans!
All right! I'm gonna be honest. - With my fans!
It's a little bit nerve-wracking.
Chad, do you really think it's okay?
I promise you
I would never do something that would be even remotely dangerous.
I was totally...
That sounds like a confident pilot right there.
I promise.
I wanna show you this first part of the video
because it highlights how these people are nervous getting into this small plane.
And I recently had a few different people come up to me at the airport
and tell me that they watched my channel
because they're nervous flyers and they wanna learn more about aviation.
So I thought
it's kind of interesting because these people
are nervous about getting the small plane
but they did it anyways and they made a video about it.
I think there's nothing wrong with doing something outside your comfort zone.
Obviously in this scenario, they were nervous about flying in a small plane
just like Stella.
When she flew with me in a small plane,
there is definitely a difference between flying in a single engine,
general aviation aircraft like this
and flying in a commercial plane.
On a small plane like this, there are definitely
more risk than flying on a commercial plane.
So when people say: "Oh, I'm nervous getting
into a small plane", like Stella was,
I can completely understand why and how that can make you nervous.
On a commercial jet, it's very different because
the training that we do is very different.
The aircraft is very different as far as what its capabilities are
and there's a bunch of different reasons why flying commercial
is really not something you should be very scared of.
But for flying these small planes, I can understand.
There is a risk involved.
Now, I believe they're flying in Utah.
Something to know is that when you're flying in a mountainous area,
the air is gonna be thinner.
Your plane's gonna be higher up in the air
And the air, as you go higher, gets thinner.
And when you're flying in thinner air,
the plane doesn't have the same performance as it would
in a lower cooler altitude.
So let's say you were flying around Massachusetts in a wintery day,
you're gonna have a lot better performance because the air is more dense
than if you go to a higher altitude in a summer day,
which it seems like they're in Utah in the summertime.
So they're gonna have warmer air and they're gonna be at a higher altitude.
The other thing to note, on a commercial aircraft when you're flying,
if you lose one engine, let's say on my plane,
I'm flying at 38,000 feet.
If I were to lose an engine,
my plane may go to 36 or 35,000 feet because we have three more engines.
So that's not really a big deal.
If you're flying on two engines and you're flying at 38,000 feet,
again, this is all based off of weight and atmospheric and things like that.
But let's say you're flying at 38, you may have to go down to 20,000 feet.
So there is different scenarios that the airlines give to us
and they tell us: "Okay, cool. In this situation,
when you're flying over these mountains,
if you lose an engine, this is what you have to do"
Now on a 747, having four engines,
means that losing one engine's really not a big deal.
Most of the times continue on with your flight.
However, on a two-engine plane, you might be over the middle of the mountains.
And what the airlines do is they give you something
that if your engine cuts off between this point,
you need to turn back and go the other way or turn this heading and go this way.
Or you need to continue going on.
And after this point, you do this other thing.
So they break down based off of the weight that you're at,
the altitude, where you're at in your flight,
they break it all down for you. And they say:
"Okay, cool. If you lose an engine here, we know you're not
gonna have the climb performance to get over this mountain.
So at that point, if you lose your engine, you need to turn back or go this direction"
Maybe you could go land at the initial airport you came from.
They lay that all out for you.
When you're flying as a general aviation pilot,
meaning you're flying a single-engine plane like this.
If you do lose your engine, you have to plan for all that stuff ahead of time.
Because the airlines do that for us and
they do that for your safety as a passenger.
When you're flying around on your own with your friends then
they're relying on you to plan all that stuff out.
However, I like what this pilot said here:
I promise you.
I would never do something that it would be even remotely dangerous.
I was totally...
That sounds like a confident pilot right there.
It looked like in the video the pilot was doing all these pre-flight checks.
He was taking things very serious. He wasn't being nonchalant
or not checking or doing the pre-flight.
He did everything that he should be doing and he had the right attitude by saying:
"I'm not gonna do anything that's gonna put you in an unsafe condition"
That's really what you want to hear from any pilot.
Whether they be a commercial pilot
or a guy who is a pilot for fun like I think this guy is.
You wanna hear that same thing.
That they're gonna do all the precautionary stuff
to prevent and reduce the amount of risk that you can have when you go out flying.
There's a risk in everything that you do.
You go drive your car to the grocery store. There's a risk.
You go fly a plane, there's a risk.
There's always gonna be risk in anything that you do,
but we can't live in a bubble for the rest of our lives.
At the end of the day, you have to realize that machines break.
All machines break at some time or another.
And you're just looking to not have it break in a really bad time for you.
It could be driving down the freeway.
You have a really important meeting to go to?
That's not when you want your car to break.
Just like if you're flying your plane at a low altitude.
That's not when you want your engine to stop working.
So let's watch this video.
Hey! There's something wrong.
Stop! Please, sir!
You can hear the lady in the back actually scream something,
thinking that the pilot's playing around here. Listen.
Stop! Please, sir!
I know there are a lot of funny videos on YouTube
where pilots pretend to fall asleep,
or they pretend the engine fails in order to get a reaction from their passenger.
And I'm assuming that's what this lady thought was going on
when he was saying: "I think there's a problem".
But then you hear the beeping noise.
And that's a harder thing to simulate.
You can see here, the propeller's actually spinning differently.
Doesn't have the same normal pattern that it had earlier.
Now, that can be from the pilot that's adding and reducing power.
I don't actually know what's going on here but
obviously, they're having engine problems.
So the engine is losing power.
Now, if you decide to start flying general aviation,
something to take away from this clip is
they came into that valley which looked super picturesque.
They were flying low and they were flying slow.
Those things are not ideal in that situation,
but it makes for a way better video as you're coming into the valley like this,
it looks really, really cool.
Now like I said earlier,
they're flying, I assume in Utah, it's summertime.
So it means warmer air.
So they have some things working against them.
Some other things they have worked against
them is that they have a plane full of people.
I don't know what the capacity of this aircraft is.
Obviously, the plane can handle this.
Otherwise this pilot wouldn't have taken them.
But there are a few things that he's doing here to put himself into a bad situation.
The fact that he's flying low to the ground, the fact that he's flying slow.
Those are your two biggest tokens when you're out flying around.
You can trade your altitude for airspeed and your airspeed for altitude.
The easiest way to explain that is,
imagine if you have this huge hill in front of you.
If you're driving your car really fast, you'd
be able to climb up that hill a lot easier.
Your speed would bleed off of your car
but you'd be able to make it up that hill a lot easier.
And you're trading climbing up that hill
with your speed on your car that you use as you ramped up to get there.
Now, if you get high up on that hill and you're ready to go down the hill,
you don't really need to add any power.
You can just let gravity pull you down.
So you're just trading the energy that you'd
be pushing into your car for your engine.
You're trading that and letting the gravity do its work and go down.
The same thing applies for a plane.
But when you're flying low, you don't have any altitude to trade.
And when you're flying slow, you don't have anything to trade from your speed.
If you were flying really fast to that mountain valley,
and then you had a problem,
there's a few things you could do.
One, you could fly further because you have speed.
So now you can go further and let the plane slow down.
You can also bring the plane up and trade some altitude for your airspeed.
If you're going really fast and then you lost an engine,
you could climb up the air,
take a look around and figure out where you want to go land
and then go back down again.
So those are your two biggest tokens you can trade.
Your airspeed and your altitude.
And right here you can see, he doesn't have either.
Now, when you factor in the fact that he's got a plane full of people,
meaning the plane is heavier and not gonna perform as well.
And then he is in a high altitude and warm air,
he has really put himself in a bit of a corner.
He doesn't have a lot of options.
If something were to go wrong, like the engine's failing,
which is exactly what's happening here.
He's put himself in a bit of a corner,
but watch what happens next.
Okay, we're gonna land
Tight guys.
Hang on tight. We're gonna probably flip over.
Relax, relax, relax. It's gonna be hard.
Like a true YouTuber, this guy kept the camera
recording the entire time, which was very impressive.
As a lot of you have seen in my Viral Debrief, I've
usually seen this situation usually from the outside.
But we had the audio and the video from the inside,
and it's kind of a unique situation
because you don't typically see plane crashes with video and audio.
I've seen the audio
and I've seen recreations of a lot of different plane crashes that we studied
as we've gone through flight school or different airlines
and different situations and a lot of simulations.
So I've seen a lot of that type of stuff
but you typically don't get the audio and video of somebody with a nice camera
that's filming everything that's going on.
So it's really interesting for me to see that.
And I think there's some really cool takeaways for all of you that are watching
that are interested in aviation to get from this.
First, let's talk about some of the things that he did really well.
As you can hear from this horn noise that's going on,
he's trying to get them away from the water and onto the beach.
Obviously, everyone is gonna have a much better chance of survival
by making it onto the beach.
Not everybody.
Sully didn't have a choice to go anywhere except the water.
That was the best choice.
In this situation, you're gonna have a much better chance if you crash
or somebody's injured
or whatever. Everybody's unconscious.
You're gonna have a much better chance of everybody surviving.
As you get onto any type of land
then you're gonna have dumping it in the water.
The second thing that I really liked is that he remained calm
and did a quick briefing with everybody.
Listen to what he says right here.
Hang on tight. We're gonna probably flip over.
He isn't screaming or panicking in this situation.
Obviously, he's just dealing with the cards that he's been dealt.
He's got not a lot of altitude
and he has not a lot of speed and he is just trying to get there.
So he's getting a quick briefing to everybody like
"Prepare yourself, brace for impact". If you will.
That's kind of what he's doing.
And he is doing it in a pretty calm fashion while he's flying the plane.
So he's not trained in these things.
I'm guessing he's not trained in any of those things but
he's staying calm. He's headed to the beach.
He's aviating, he's navigating
and now he's communicating and telling everybody that's on the plane:
"Hey, get ready! We're gonna crash or we're gonna probably flip over"
That's I guess the equivalent of saying "Brace for impact".
Hang on tight. We're gonna probably flip over.
Now, he's not doing any checklists or things like that,
but honestly, there's just a couple of seconds.
So I'm guessing there's maybe some memory items that he tried.
I'm sure he was messing around with some of the power or
trying to get it to go before he realized that
the engine was gonna die.
And then he just started heading and making that decision
that he was gonna go land there on that field.
Now I'm not gonna debate with people as far as for
"Oh, he should have done this and do the belly up landing on the water"
or on the beach or he should have done that.
You don't really know.
Had this flight landed and worked out fine.
It would've been like: "Oh yeah, that's the obvious choice".
But since it didn't work out great and they crashed,
then people were gonna
always second guess what his decision was.
At the end of the day, it all happens really fast.
I've never been in a plane crash before
but you can imagine during the time when he realized
that the engine wasn't gonna work
and to the time where he decided that he had to land,
there was only a couple of seconds,
which isn't a lot of time to come up with a change of game plan.
So now let's talk about some of the things that were not going well at this point.
The first thing is that he's banking or it looks like he's banking.
The camera's moving around a lot.
This guy's sitting up there holding the camera.
He's about to be in a plane crash.
So I don't really blame him.
It's not like it was "goproed" that you could see everything that's going on,
but it looks like he's banking at a very altitude.
And the plane sounds like it's stalling at a relatively high altitude.
That's a dangerous situation because as all of you know,
if the plane stalls at 75 feet,
you don't have time to recover.
So by banking, what you're doing is you're reducing the lift from the wings.
So really in this scenario,
what you're gonna want to do is just commit to something.
Commit to landing on the beach or on the grass or wherever you're going
and commit to do it.
Now that's easier said than done.
All of you have been in a situation where there's
something that you know that you have to do,
but you really don't wanna do it.
So you're kind of reserved about it.
I don't know, like ripping off a bandaid,
the easiest thing to do would be to just rip it off,
but you're being really slow and peeling
and twisting and I've done it before too.
So I'm guilty of it,
but doing that and being more reserved in what you're doing
and not just fully committing, like this is what we're gonna do,
sometimes can make it worse.
You can hear that stall horn going off because he's trying to get to the beach
which I understood.
But now once they had made
and I guess landing was assured as far as where they were going,
you're not gonna want to bank.
You're not gonna want to take any lift out those wings.
You're just gonna want to get the wings
going level to wherever you're trying to go,
get down as close to the ground as you can,
and then you're gonna have to hope for the best.
You're gonna hope that you can catch a patch of grass or something,
because that could be logs
and all kinds of stuff out there that this type of plane is not made for.
There are planes like Bush planes with these big old tires
that can land and kind of roll over anything.
This plane doesn't look like one of those types of planes though.
Now I know from the comfort of my hotel room
or from the comfort of your living room,
you can watch and say: "Oh, I would do this".
And now what I want you to do is if you are a pilot,
that's something that you should be thinking about it.
Had this pilot been 500 or a 1000 feet higher?
Had they been going faster?
There's a few things that they could have
done to put themselves in a better situation
for an engine failing.
Had they been at a 1000 or 1500 feet more?
That's a lot of extra time to plan to try to get towards a road,
try to get towards a better field.
What the situation is.
By being low and slow, he put himself into a really small corner.
Especially being summertime, in Utah with a plane full of people.
It was a great visual.
And the reality was is it wasn't unsafe
because you're not going in there expecting for your engine to fail.
He obviously was flying the plane flying
and had the engine continued to work.
It would've been no big deal,
but he put himself into a corner where if that one thing happened,
the engine failing,
he had really no outs.
So that's a bad part of the decision making to
get in this situation that he put himself in.
Something that I think is really cool about this entire situation is that
even though this all happened and it wasn't obviously planned
and the pilot and everybody on board survived,
they were banged up.
The two guys in the front got banged up pretty bad.
I know that one of them got airlifted out.
So they were in pretty bad conditions, but they came out.
They were okay and they remained friends.
Which I think is really cool because it was just a bad accident that happened.
When you saw me do some of those general aviation videos,
when I went up and did that
one of the things that I did on the way back after I did a couple of landings
to prove I knew what I was doing to the instructor and I guess kind of to myself,
because it'd been a while since I flew a small plane but,
on the way back, when we were coming back,
we were, I don't know, 2-3000 feet or so.
And I pulled the power all the way back just to see kind of what it cruise like.
What it would glide like, how far would it go.
And I just wanted to have an idea of what does it look like.
Now having no engine and having the engine at idle isn't the same
but at least gave me an idea like what is this thing gliding like.
Some planes don't glide very well.
Those planes that I was flying in those videos, they glided really well.
So at least I knew
if I was over water or I was overthink,
I would have a pretty good glide ratio.
Now that is partly just experience
knowing trading airspeed for altitude and things like that.
That just comes from experience.
But I just wanted to have a ballpark idea like
how is this thing gonna go? And how's this thing gonna fly?
And that's something if you're ever gonna go general aviation stuff
and fly small planes, that's something you should do.
Pull the power back every now and again.
And just kind of check your skills, make sure that you can make it to the runway
and you can have that visual like
"Okay, I'm here. I know that I can make it."
Or I know that I can get this far and test yourself out.
While your engine's working.
So that way if you don't get there, you know
"Okay, well. That was too far or I was too fast or I could have done this"
It's always good to do that. Don't get so complacent.
That's the thing about general aviation that there's a higher risk at.
You're flying one engine and you can get a lot more complacent
because there's not a lot of rules.
There's no regulation training. There's all this stuff
that you don't have when you do general aviation.
It also doesn't have all the rules that you have as you're an airline pilot.
When you're an airline pilot, you're going for training every six months.
You're flying on a very rigid program.
You have a dispatcher, you have Air Traffic Control,
you have multiple engines,
you have all these different things to help you out.
And that's why air travel as you're flying as a commercial passenger
is really, really safe.
When you get into general aviation, it's not that way.
When I did that video with Stella, people were saying like:
"You're a flight attendant. How could you be scared to do this?"
But the reality is that flying on a single-engine plane
is not nearly the same as flying on a commercial aircraft.
There's a reason to have some nerves.
You're smaller,
if your engine failed, now a lot of things that have to happen
that I would have to do right to get us back on the ground
when Stella and I were flying.
Because, obviously, her flying tactic was to grab my arm and scream.
So that wasn't gonna get us on the ground.
So she was gonna have to rely solely on me.
When you're flying on a commercial aircraft and you have an engine failure,
well, your other engine's gonna be fine.
You have two pilots up there.
You have all these training that you do for that situation.
When you're doing general aviation, you don't have that.
Now, if you wanna see the video with me and Stella where she's screaming,
I thought it was really funny.
Check out this video here.
And if you wanna see some other people with some really hard landings,
check out this video up here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then, keep the blue side up.
A YouTuber family survived a plane crash and they caught it all on video.
So, you know I had to cover it.
Viral Debrief.
Relax, relax!
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've been sent this video several times
and despite this family being kind of beat up after the plane crash,
they all survived.
But there's some really cool things in here I wanna show you.
Let's get into it!
Jaz.
How do you feel when you get up into the plane?
Be honest.
Be honest with my fans!
All right! I'm gonna be honest. - With my fans!
It's a little bit nerve-wracking.
Chad, do you really think it's okay?
I promise you
I would never do something that would be even remotely dangerous.
I was totally...
That sounds like a confident pilot right there.
I promise.
I wanna show you this first part of the video
because it highlights how these people are nervous getting into this small plane.
And I recently had a few different people come up to me in the airport
and tell me that they watched my channel
because they're nervous flyers and they wanna learn more about aviation.
So I thought
it's kind of interesting because these people
are nervous about getting the small plane
but they did it anyways and they made a video about it.
I think there's nothing wrong with doing something outside your comfort zone.
Obviously in this scenario, they were nervous about flying in a small plane
just like Stella.
When she flew with me in a small plane,
there is definitely a difference between flying in a single engine,
general aviation aircraft like this
and flying in a commercial plane.
On a small plane like this, there are definitely
more risk than flying on a commercial plane.
So when people say: "Oh, I'm nervous getting
into a small plane", like Stella was,
I can completely understand why and how that can make you nervous.
On a commercial jet, it's very different because
the training that we do is very different.
The aircraft is very different as far as what its capabilities are
and there's a bunch of different reasons why flying commercial
is really not something you should be very scared of.
But for flying these small planes, I can understand.
There is a risk involved.
Now, I believe they're flying in Utah.
Something to know is that when you're flying in a mountainous area,
the air is gonna be thinner.
Your plane's gonna be higher up in the air
And the air, as you go higher, gets thinner.
And when you're flying in thinner air,
the plane doesn't have the same performance as it would
in a lower cooler altitude.
So let's say you were flying around Massachusetts in a wintery day,
you're gonna have a lot better performance because the air is more dense
than if you go to a higher altitude in a summer day,
which it seems like they're in Utah in the summertime.
So they're gonna have warmer air and they're gonna be at a higher altitude.
The other thing to note, on a commercial aircraft when you're flying,
if you lose one engine, let's say on my plane,
I'm flying at 38,000 feet.
If I were to lose an engine,
my plane may go to 36 or 35,000 feet because we have three more engines.
So that's not really a big deal.
If you're flying on two engines and you're flying at 38,000 feet,
again, this is all based off of weight and atmospheric and things like that.
But let's say you're flying at 38, you may have to go down to 20,000 feet.
So there is different scenarios that the airlines give to us
and they tell us: "Okay, cool. In this situation,
when you're flying over these mountains,
if you lose an engine, this is what you have to do"
Now on a 747, having four engines,
means that losing one engine's really not a big deal.
Most of the times continue on with your flight.
However, on a two engine plane, you might be over the middle of the mountains.
And what the airlines do is they give you something
that if your engine cuts off between this point,
you need to turn back and go the other way or turn this heading and go this way.
Or you need to continue going on.
And after this point, you do this other thing.
So they break down based off of the weight that you're at,
the altitude, where you're at in your flight,
they break it all down for you. And they say:
"Okay, cool. If you lose an engine here, we know you're not
gonna have the climb performance to get over this mountain.
So at that point, if you lose your engine, you need to turn back or go this direction"
Maybe you could go land at the initial airport you came from.
They lay that all out for you.
When you're flying as a general aviation pilot,
meaning you're flying a single engine plane like this.
If you do lose your engine, you have to plan for all that stuff ahead of time.
Because the airlines do that for us and
they do that for your safety as a passenger.
When you're flying around on your own with your friends then
they're relying on you to plan all that stuff out.
However, I like what this pilot said here:
I promise you.
I would never do something that it would be even remotely dangerous.
I was totally...
That sounds like a confident pilot right there.
It looked like in the video the pilot was doing all this pre-flight checks.
He was taking things very serious. He wasn't being nonchalant
or not checking or doing the pre-flight.
He did everything that he should be doing and he had the right attitude by saying:
"I'm not gonna do anything that's gonna put you in an unsafe condition"
That's really what you want to hear from any pilot.
Whether they be a commercial pilot
or a guy who is a pilot for fun like I think this guy is.
You wanna hear that same thing.
That they're gonna do all the precautionary stuff
to prevent and reduce the amount of risk that you can have when you go out flying.
There's a risk in everything that you do.
You go drive your car to the grocery store. There's a risk.
You go fly plane, there's a risk.
There's always gonna be risk in anything that you do,
but we can't live in a bubble for the rest of our lives.
At the end of the day, you have to realize that machines break.
All machines break at some time or another.
And you're just looking to not have it break in a really bad time for you.
It could be driving down the freeway.
You have a really important meeting to go to?
That's not when you want your car to break.
Just like if you're flying your plane at a low altitude.
That's not when you want your engine to stop working.
So let's watch this video.
Hey! There's something wrong.
Stop! Please, sir!
You can hear the lady in the back actually scream something,
thinking that the pilot's playing around here. Listen.
Stop! Please, sir!
I know there's a lot of funny videos on YouTube
where pilots pretend to fall asleep,
or they pretend the engine fails in order to get a reaction from their passenger.
And I'm assuming that's what this lady thought was going on
when he was saying: "I think there's a problem".
But then you hear the beeping noise.
And that's a harder thing to simulate.
You can see here, the propeller's actually spinning differently.
Doesn't have the same normal pattern that it had earlier.
Now, that can be from the pilot that's adding and reducing power.
I don't actually know what's going on here but
obviously, they're having engine problems.
So the engine is losing power.
Now, if you decide to start flying general aviation,
something to take away from this clip is
they came into that valley which looked super picturesque.
They were flying low and they were flying slow.
Those things are not ideal in that situation,
but it makes for a way better video as you're coming into the valley like this,
it looks really, really cool.
Now like I said earlier,
they're flying, I assume in Utah, it's summertime.
So it means warmer air.
So they have some things working against them.
Some other things they have working against
them is that they have a plane full of people.
I don't know what the capacity of this aircraft is.
Obviously, the plane can handle this.
Otherwise this pilot wouldn't have taken them.
But there are a few things that he's doing here to put himself into a bad situation.
The fact that he's flying low to the ground, the fact that he's flying slow.
Those are your two biggest tokens when you're out flying around.
You can trade your altitude for airspeed and your airspeed for altitude.
The easiest way to explain that is,
imagine if you have this huge hill in front of you.
If you're driving your car really fast, you'd
be able to climb up that hill a lot easier.
Your speed would bleed off of your car
but you'd be able to make it up that hill a lot easier.
And you're trading climbing up that hill
with your speed on your car that you use as you ramped up to get there.
Now, if you get high up on that hill and you're ready to go down the hill,
you don't really need to add any power.
You can just let gravity pull you down.
So you're just trading the energy that you'd
be pushing into your car for your engine.
You're trading that and letting gravity do its work and go down.
The same thing applies for a plane.
But when you're flying low, you don't have any altitude to trade.
And when you're flying slow, you don't have anything to trade from your speed.
If you were flying really fast to that mountain valley,
and then you had a problem,
there's a few things you could do.
One, you could fly further because you have speed.
So now you can go further and let the plane slow down.
You can also bring the plane up and trade some altitude for your airspeed.
If you're going really fast and then you lost an engine,
you could climb up air,
take a look around and figure out where you want to go land
and then go back down again.
So those are your two biggest tokens you can trade.
Your airspeed and your altitude.
And right here you can see, he doesn't have either.
Now, when you factor in the fact that he's got a plane full of people,
meaning the plane is heavier and not gonna perform as well.
And then he is in a high altitude and warm air,
he has really put himself in bit of a corner.
He doesn't have a lot of options.
If something were to go wrong, like the engine's failing,
which is exactly what's happening here.
He's put himself in a bit of a corner,
but watch what happens next.
Okay, we're gonna land
Tight guys.
Hang on tight. We're gonna probably flip over.
Relax, relax, relax. It's gonna be hard.
Like a true YouTuber, this guy kept the camera
recording the entire time, which was very impressive.
As a lot of you have seen in my Viral Debrief, I've
usually seen this situation usually from the outside.
But we had the audio and the video from the inside,
and it's kind of a unique situation
because you don't typically see plane crashes with video and audio.
I've seen the audio
and I've seen recreations of a lot of different plane crashes that we studied
as we've gone through flight school or different airlines
and different situations and a lot of simulations.
So I've seen a lot of that type of stuff
but you typically don't get the audio and video of somebody with a nice camera
that's filming everything that's going on.
So it's really interesting for me to see that.
And I think there's some really cool takeaways for all of you that are watching
that are interested in aviation to get from this.
First, let's talk about some of the things that he did really well.
As you can hear from this horn noise that's going on,
he's trying to get them away from the water and onto the beach.
Obviously, everyone is gonna have a much better chance of survival
by making it onto the beach.
Not everybody.
Sully didn't have a choice to go anywhere except the water.
That was the best choice.
In this situation, you're gonna have a much better chance if you crash
or somebody's injured
or whatever. Everybody's unconscious.
You're gonna have a much better chance of everybody surviving.
As you get onto any type of land
then you're gonna have dumping it in the water.
The second thing that I really liked is that he remained calm
and did a quick briefing with everybody.
Listen to what he says right here.
Hang on tight. We're gonna probably flip over.
He isn't screaming or panicking in this situation.
Obviously, he's just dealing with the cards that he's been dealt.
He's got not a lot of altitude
and he has not a lot of speed and he is just trying to get there.
So he's getting a quick briefing to everybody like
"Prepare yourself, brace for impact". If you will.
That's kind of what he's doing.
And he is doing it in a pretty calm fashion while he's flying the plane.
So he's not trained in these things.
I'm guessing he's not trained in any of those things but
he's staying calm. He's headed to the beach.
He's aviating, he's navigating
and now he's communicating and telling everybody that's on the plane:
"Hey, get ready! We're gonna crash or we're gonna probably flip over"
That's I guess the equivalent of saying "Brace for impact".
Hang on tight. We're gonna probably flip over.
Now, he's not doing any checklists or things like that,
but honestly there's just a couple of seconds.
So I'm guessing there's maybe some memory items that he tried.
I'm sure he was messing around with some of the power or
trying to get it to go before he realized that
the engine was gonna die.
And then he just started heading and making that decision
that he was gonna go land there on that field.
Now I'm not gonna debate with people as far as for
"Oh, he should have done this and do the belly up landing on the water"
or on the beach or he should have done that.
You don't really know.
Had this flight landed and worked out fine.
It would've been like: "Oh yeah, that's the obvious choice".
But since it didn't work out great and they crashed,
then people were gonna
always second guess what his decision was.
At the end of the day, it all happens really fast.
I've never been in a plane crash before
but you can imagine during the time when he realized
that the engine wasn't gonna work
and to the time where he decided that he had to land,
there was only a couple of seconds,
which isn't a lot of time to come up with a change of game plan.
So now let's talk about some of the things that were not going well at this point.
The first thing is that he's banking or it looks like he's banking.
The camera's moving around a lot.
This guy's sitting up there holding the camera.
He's about to be in a plane crash.
So I don't really blame him.
It's not like it was "goproed" that you could see everything that's going on,
but it looks like he's banking at a very altitude.
And the plane sounds like it's stalling at a relatively high altitude.
That's a dangerous situation because as all of you know,
if the plane stalls at 75 feet,
you don't have time to recover.
So by banking, what you're doing is you're reducing the lift from the wings.
So really in this scenario,
what you're gonna want to do is just commit to something.
Commit to landing on the beach or on the grass or wherever you're going
and commit to do it.
Now that's easier said than done.
All of you have been in a situation where there's
something that you know that you have to do,
but you really don't wanna do it.
So you're kind of reserved about it.
I don't know, like ripping off a bandaid,
the easiest thing to do would be to just rip it off,
but you're being really slow and peeling
and twisting and I've done it before too.
So I'm guilty of it,
but doing that and being more reserved in what you're doing
and not just fully committing, like this is what we're gonna do,
sometimes can make it worse.
You can hear that stall horn going off because he's trying to get to the beach
which I understood.
But now once they had made
and I guess, landing was assured as far as where they were going,
you're not gonna want to bank.
You're not gonna want to take any lift out those wings.
You're just gonna want to get the wings
going level to wherever you're trying to go,
get down as close to the ground as you can,
and then you're gonna have to hope for the best.
You're gonna hope that you can catch a patch of grass or something,
because that could be logs
and all kinds of stuff out there that this type of plane is not made for.
There are planes like Bush planes with these big old tires
that can land and kind of roll over anything.
This plane doesn't look like one of those types of planes though.
Now I know from the comfort of my hotel room
or from the comfort of your living room,
you can watch and say: "Oh, I would do this".
And now what I want you to do is if you are a pilot,
that's something that you should be think about.
Had this pilot been 500 or a 1000 feet higher?
Had they been going faster?
There's a few things that they could have
done to put themselves in a better situation
for an engine failing.
Had they been at a 1000 or 1500 feet more?
That's a lot of extra time to plan to try to get towards a road,
try to get towards a better field.
What the situation is.
By being low and slow, he put himself into a really small corner.
Especially being summertime, in Utah with a plane full of people.
It was a great visual.
And the reality was is it wasn't unsafe
because you're not going in there expecting for your engine to fail.
He obviously was flying the plane flying
and had the engine continued to work.
It would've been no big deal,
but he put himself into a corner where if that one thing happened,
the engine failing,
he had really no outs.
So that's a bad part of the decision making to
get in this situation that he put himself in.
Something that I think is really cool about this entire situation is that
even though this all happened and it wasn't obviously planned
and the pilot and everybody on board survived,
they were banged up.
The two guys in the front got banged up pretty bad.
I know that one of them got airlifted out.
So they were in pretty bad conditions, but they came out.
They were okay and they remained friends.
Which I think is really cool because it was just a bad accident that happened.
When you saw me do some of those general aviation videos,
when I went up and did that
one of the things that I did on the way back after I did a couple landings
to prove I knew what I was doing to the instructor and I guess kind of to myself,
because it'd been a while since I flew a small plane but,
on the way back, when we were coming back,
we were, I don't know, 2-3000 feet or so.
And I pulled the power all the way back just to see kind of what it cruise like.
What it would glide like, how far would it go.
And I just wanted to have an idea of what does it look like.
Now having no engine and having the engine at idle isn't the same
but at least gave me an idea like what is this thing gliding like.
Some planes don't glide very well.
Those planes that I was flying in those videos, they glided really well.
So at least I knew
if I was over water or I was over think,
I would have a pretty good glide ratio.
Now that is partly just experience
knowing trading airspeed for altitude and things like that.
That just comes from experience.
But I just wanted to have a ballpark idea like
how is this thing gonna go? And how's this thing gonna fly?
And that's something if you're ever gonna go general aviation stuff
and fly small planes, that's something you should do.
Pull the power back every now and again.
And just kind of check your skills, make sure that you can make it to the runway
and you can have that visual like
"Okay, I'm here. I know that I can make it."
Or I know that I can get this far and test yourself out.
While your engine's working.
So that way if you don't get there, you know
"Okay, well. That was too far or I was too fast or I could have done this"
It's always good to do that. Don't get so complacent.
That's the thing about general aviation that there's a higher risk at.
You're flying one engine and you can get a lot more complacent
because there's not a lot of rules.
There's no regulation training. There's all this stuff
that you don't have when you do general aviation.
It also doesn't have all the rules that you have as you're an airline pilot.
When you're an airline pilot, you're going for training every six months.
You're flying on a very rigid program.
You have a dispatcher, you have Air Traffic Control,
you have multiple engines,
you have all these different things to help you out.
And that's why air travel as you're flying as a commercial passenger
is really, really safe.
When you get into general aviation, it's not that way.
When I did that video with Stella, people were saying like:
"You're a flight attendant. How could you be scared to do this?"
But the reality is that flying on a single engine plane
is not nearly the same as flying on a commercial aircraft.
There's a reason to have some nerves.
You're smaller,
if your engine failed, now a lot of things that have to happen
that I would have to do right to get us back on the ground
when Stella and I were flying.
Because, obviously, her flying tactic was to grab my arm and scream.
So that wasn't gonna get us on the ground.
So she was gonna have to rely solely on me.
When you're flying on a commercial aircraft and you have an engine failure,
well, your other engine's gonna be fine.
You have two pilots up there.
You have all these training that you do for that situation.
When you're doing general aviation, you don't have that.
Now, if you wanna see the video with me and Stella where she's screaming,
I thought it was really funny.
Check out this video here.
And if you wanna see some other people with some really hard landings,
check out this video up here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.