This is not a maneuver that you ever want to be in when you're flying.
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 want to thank all of you in the 74 crew who
have been sending me these different videos
because without you, there is no way I
could keep making this Viral Debrief series.
The easiest way to send them to me if you want my opinion on it,
is through my Instagram or through the forum that I made at 74 gear.
Keep sending those videos and until then,
let's get into it!
Yeah. This is a typical maneuver that we do in flight school.
That's not good.
That's a flat spin like from Top Gun.
This is not a maneuver that you ever want to be in when you're flying.
He starts off by doing a maneuver called "The Stall".
If you aren't familiar with what a stall is,
essentially it's where the aircraft is going so slow.
There's not enough air going over the wings.
With that the aircraft doesn't want to fly.
It noses over like what you saw in the video.
It noses over and it goes to regain speed.
It's a maneuver that you will never ever see
a commercial airline pilot doing in real life.
But it's something that we learn in flight school so in the
event that something does go wrong, we know how to recover.
And we usually do it at a high enough altitude that if
something goes wrong while we're practicing that maneuver,
we have time to recover.
So that's what that maneuver is and that's what it starts off by doing.
I should tell you right now before we get into the
video there are rain clouds and big pockets of sun,
so the coloring and the lighting on this video
is going to change throughout the whole video.
So I just want to let you know that's what's going on.
Typically, the biggest mistake that happens
when you're going to flight school is a spin.
Which is what you see him starting off right here getting into.
A spin isn't necessarily dangerous in most planes. They're easily recoverable.
However, this man in his attempt to be Maverick from Top Gun,
gets himself into a flat spin. That's a lot different to recover from.
I say flat spin instead of spin because you can see here the horizon?
The plane is basically level with the horizon.
That's very dangerous.
The reason that it's harder is
there isn't a lot of air going over the wings or over the surface of the wings
and that air is what you use to control the movement of the plane.
The easiest way that I can explain this to you is
when you're driving your car on the ground.
If you turn the wheel of your car on the ground and you press the gas,
there's friction between the tire and the ground.
So when you turn that, that friction is what
helps move your car to the left or to the right.
If there's no air going over the wings, there's no
resistance to help get your plane to turn left or right.
He's just going straight down. There's no wind coming over the wings.
It's just going right past him.
Imagine if you're driving and you're hydroplaning really fast.
Like skidding over the water.
You can turn the wheel all you want but there is no friction.
So the car doesn't respond.
That's kind of like a flat spin.
This is a super dangerous situation to be in
especially without a parachute on your aircraft.
If Goose couldn't survive it, this is not something
that you're ever going to see a pilot to do on purpose.
I'm not going to get into the various recovery techniques on this
but here is something super important to take away from this video.
The pilot doesn't give up.
I'm sure he was very scared.
Maybe not Stella Flying a plane scared
but very scared.
And he's obviously spinning at a very rapid rate so
it'd be easy to get disoriented to what's going on.
But he got out of the spin and crash landed now.
I'm sure that wasn't the landing that he intended,
but that would have been a lot better than if he had just not done anything.
The plane is not going to get itself out of that
flat spin so he did something to recover it.
You see here, he picked a field to land in?
Which after everything was probably the safest
move instead of trying to restart the engine.
The biggest takeaway from this video is don't ever give up.
If you find yourself in a situation where things have gone
wrong, you first need to go to the things you got taught to do.
If that's not working, then you need to keep trying new things.
Never give up if you're in a situation.
First, your training. Then go to start trying to invent things.
If all the normal stuff and all the checklists and all
the things you've been taught to do aren't working,
you need to start trying something else.
Put out the flaps, put the gear out, do something
different to try to resolve the situation
but never ever quit.
That did not go as planned.
That obviously did not go as planned.
There is something that general aviation pilots do that is a little bit silly to me
but I got taught it when I was in flight school and I see a lot of
pilots that do it as well when they're going through flight school,
and that's exactly what this pilot was doing here.
And that's trying to land on the numbers.
What that means is you're trying to land at the very start of the runway.
I know they say all the runway behind you is wasted runway,
but the people who say that probably never piloted their
aircraft into the mound at the beginning part of a runway.
There are two reasons, I think, it's smart to give
yourself some distance when you're landing on a runway.
One,
what you see here is very bad but it's actually pretty uncommon.
But the reason why I say: "Don't aim to land on the numbers"
is if he had an engine fail right here,
do you think he would have made the runway?
Probably not.
He's very low to the ground and he's slow.
But this guy actually really did himself in.
You'll hear him give it some throttle and then pull it back way too soon.
The wind is coming right down the runway, it doesn't
look like there's any major gusts that he hit.
He's just trying to land at the start of the runway and he missed.
Landing at the numbers can backfire exactly like this.
This was really just poor decision making by the pilot
trying to land too early at the start of the runway
and not reacting to the situation where his
plane was sinking and not gonna make it.
He pulled back the power too soon instead of adding power
and either extending his landing or going around and trying again.
I was seeing this on the news when it happened.
How crazy would that be?
There's another angle from, I think, the person right ahead of the first shot.
See the plane coming in?
Nuts!
Man, that would really...
Would really be scary to be part of that.
So we have a lot of different footage here and
actually, we have footage from the other aircraft
that actually was below them.
We have footage of that.
We'll watch that and then we'll debrief this video.
I see they can't even see anything.
This is actually a little bit of a tricky video even though we have
so many different angles and different cameras which is great.-
The footage is a little bit grainy so it makes it a bit
hard to see exactly what the pilot's instruments are doing
which would be very helpful in this video.
But something that's really cool about this is that
both the pilots and all the skydivers survived.
Which is crazy when you watch that video and think:
"Everybody made it out okay!"
Obviously, someone isn't in level flight though.
The other thing to keep in mind is that they're
flying a Cessna which are high wing aircraft.
That means they're great for sitting below you but not above you.
Like you see here?
The pilot can see down but not up.
Because the wing.
So the pilot who was flying in the front and below the other aircraft,
is going to be almost impossible for him to see the
aircraft that's behind him and take evasive maneuvers.
The footage from the plane that's behind and above the
lead plane, something to note here is from this angle
it appears that the plane is in level flight or at least not descending.
Again, this is grainy footage but see this right here?
This is a vertical speed indicator.
And it shows that the plane is going up or down and how fast.
But it appears that he is not descending.
We can only see a glimpse of that
and then you look over here and see the
closure rate of these two planes is very fast.
You can see the plane below is coming up
and you don't see or hear any evasive maneuvers from the pilot.
Meaning, you don't hear the pilot pull the power back
and you don't see him bank in any direction.
It's easy for me to say: "Oh! I would do this."
but it happens pretty fast.
Here's the issue if you're the trailing plane above.
The aircraft is below you and to your right
which is the direction you would want to bank.
Why to the right?
If you bank to the left, you run the risk of these
people actually getting thrown into your propeller.
Which they're obviously not going to survive.
If you go to the right, it's counter intuitive because
you're going towards the plane that's coming at you.
But it's actually the better option of the two.
The only real option here that I see would be
to pull the power back and try to slowly climb
or hold your altitude and pitch up in a way to create more separation.
If he had pulled the power all the way back right here,
the other plane should have flown right in front of him.
If you add full power and pitch up,
you run the risk of the sky divers here actually
falling backwards into your horizontal stabilizer.
Which is the wing on the back of the plane.
They could hit that and then be unconscious which is
obviously very bad if you're falling towards the ground.
There's an art to formation flying and this pilot put himself in a situation
where he had really no options to get out.
And then the pilot that's down below at the lower altitude
will almost be impossible to see him because he has a high wing.
I mean he can't see past his wing and behind him because there's a wing there.
So who climbed into who?
It's really hard to say.
The main thing here that I want you to take away from this video is
you always want to leave yourself an option
if you get into a bad situation.
And this pilot that was in the above plane didn't
really leave himself any options in case things went bad
which is exactly what happened.
All right! Another A380 video.
I'm guessing that's because of this other A380 video that I did earlier.
Oh no! Is he got it? He's gonna go-around.
Floating.
Is he gonna go-around?
Oh my God!
Nicely done.
Something that most people don't know is that
you can actually use this technique in a 747
and a lot of Airbus aircraft.
Which is to land in a crab.
This is actually contradictory to everything
that you get taught in flight school
but what it means is instead of landing straight down the runway,
you come in and land at a crooked angle like you see right here.
Coming in like this is known as crabbing.
The momentum of the aircraft is so massive on some of these aircraft
and they're designed in a way to handle this side loading.
It's moving so much mass forward that when you touch down,
the mass of the plane keeps wanting to go in that forward direction.
So it touches down on the runway right here
and you see it just pulls the plane around and pushes it forward.
I've flown with 747 pilots who use this technique
but here is my personal disagreement and why I don't do it.
If you are these people right here in the back,
look how far they are moving and how quickly
they are moving to the center of the runway.
For passengers, it's going to be a very uncomfortable experience.
If you feel uncomfortable safely getting the aircraft down while using the rudder,
by all means land in the crab.
If your aircraft is designed to do that, of course.
And some of you may say: "Kelsey, why do you care? You're always flying boxes"
Well, that's about 95% of my flying but I do fly passengers as well.
And the thing is I'm a creature of habit and most pilots are as well.
You develop muscle memory
and so if you get into the habit of always
landing in the crab in a crosswind like this,
then you're gonna do it whether you have boxes or people in the back.
If you never saw the A380 video that I did earlier
where they kicked the rudder too soon and almost skidded off the runway,
I'll put a link to that video right here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.