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 want to thank all of you for sending me all these different clips.
I really appreciate all of you.
If you have a clip that you want to see in this series,
the easiest place to send to me is on my Instagram.
All right. Let's get into it!
I don't know who it would be worse to be in this situation.
The guy who's taking off
or the guy who's getting attacked from all sides,
from the guy who's trying to take off.
The only place he didn't hit is in the front of the plane,
but he literally hit all three sides of that plane.
I've never seen anything like that before in my entire life.
I have no idea where in the world this is.
But it looks amazing.
And I'm sure if they had taken off, it would have been a great video.
Something every new pilot experiences as they go through flight school
is learning that a single engine plane always wants to pull.
And a lot of cases, you'll hear your flight instructor saying:
"Right rudder, right rudder, right rudder"
Like a couple of hundred times.
Or if you were my flight instructor, maybe a couple thousand times.
But the plane is always wanting to pull to the side,
which is what happened in this video here.
The problem is that, you as a new pilot,
usually tend to be to gentle on the controls.
You don't want to be too aggressive.
The funny thing is that when you're flying these smaller planes,
you have to be aggressive.
But when you go to a bigger plane, you have to be gentle.
Think of it like driving a sports car or a big 18 wheeler truck.
If you were really aggressive when you were steering that big 18 wheeler truck,
it's never going to work out.
Like if you were really aggressive when you're steering a sports car.
These small planes are like sports cars.
You have to be aggressive and you have to take a little bit more control
when you're flying those.
If you were to be that aggressive on the controls with a big plane
like a 747,
you would possibly break it or have another problem.
The failure here is two parts.
One, the pilot looks like they're starting their takeoff role
in the middle of the grass strip.
Which normally is where you want to take off
because it gives you the greatest safety margin on both sides
to prevent from going off the runway.
However, that doesn't account for there being another plane partially on your runway.
When the pilot adds power,
you can see the plane pulled to the left
And the pilot doing the takeoff doesn't do enough to correct it.
If the plane isn't doing what you need it to be doing,
then you have to start putting in inputs to get it to change
or do something different than what's going on.
This paralysis often happens to newer pilots.
They're trying to analyze all the information that it's coming in
and their brain is very slow to compute.
And because there's so much information that's happening
and so they're very slow to react.
A good analysis that you've probably seen
or a comparison that you've seen in movies
is a bunch of Marines.
You'll have a new Marine and they're on a patrol
and then they start getting shot at.
And then this new Marine is just standing there staring at these people
that are shooting them.
And in this experience Marine will grab him and throw them under the ground.
And you think: "Who would do that in real life?"
But it happens.
You'll have a new Marine and then these bullets are whizzing past
and their brain is like trying to calculate like:
"What's happening? I don't understand"
like you're in a life or death situation.
but you're so new that you can't process the information.
Things are sped up so fast that you look so, so slow to react.
And sometimes that's what happens with new pilots
and possibly what happened in this situation here.
The pilot hits the side of the plane,
which means 100 percent they're not taking off at this point.
But then, they maybe mentally freeze and proceed to circle around
hitting the planes on all sides including
mowing part of the grass in the process.
The takeaway here that's really important is that when your aircraft is not doing
what you needed to be doing, you need to change something.
As soon as the pilot had hit the other aircraft on the side,
had they pulled the power?
They would have changed something.
Hey, I'm not trying to take off into this plane.
It's not doing what I want. I need to change something.
But they didn't.
They just kind of sat there and let the plane ram the other plane.
There's a saying that I got told from a guy who went through flight school
as a fighter pilot.
He said: "You can make a lot of bad decisions and we can learn from that,
but we can't learn from you making no decision at all".
That's kind of what happened here.
As soon as that pilot started hitting that plane,
they should have made a decision and done something different.
Obviously, they didn't put in enough rudder in the very beginning,
and they obviously took off the wrong location on the takeoff there.
They should have been further over to the side.
But those decisions are correctable.
The thing that's not correctable, as soon as he hit the plane,
they're not making any decisions.
They're should have pulled the power,
stomped on the brakes, a lot of different things.
But none of those things happened.
This looks like Miami and even though they didn't have a engine pod strike
or a wingtip strike,
they probably should have gone around here.
So the pilots are dealing with a crosswind from the right,
from the best I can tell this to kind of a blurry picture here.
In flight school something that we're taught
is that when we're in a crosswind like that
is to keep the wing down.
That's towards where the wind is coming from
and then land on that side of the plane first,
land that tire first.
Then the other tire and then the nose, right?
That's something you get taught when you go to flight school.
At least that's what I was taught.
Keep the wing down, land one tire and then the other tire.
Which makes sense for that aircraft. It's fine.
The problem is that if you're doing that on a bigger plane,
it does not work out like that.
Now, I flew several different corporate aircraft before I ended up
flying at the airlines and one of the very first airline flights I did,
I was going into Denver, I believe, and we had a pretty strong crosswind.
I would say maybe 25 knots something like that.
And I thought, I was brand new.
I was with a special captain called Check Airman.
I thought that the captain was going to say: "I'll take this"
because it's a pretty stiff crosswind.
And I don't think we were supposed to do anything above like
10 or 15 knots in the very beginning.
And so I thought: "He would take the controls", but he didn't.
He said: "Hey, you're here. Let's see if you know how to fly".
Now, on some of the planes that I flew,
what we would do is dip the wing, put on a little bit of an opposite rudder.
So the plane would be flying straight and it would keep the wing down.
And you would not worry about the wing going up
and getting blown off the center of the runway.
But the plane is then tilted.
It's not a ideal thing for a bigger plane.
It all worked out fine.
And as soon as we landed, the one of the flight attendants came up to me and said:
"I've never landed with the plane so crooked like that
That was kind of weird. Why was it doing that?"
And I was like: "Oh, yeah, it was kind of windy.
So I was trying to keep it to the side".
So that was one of the very first experiences I had flying a jet
in a crosswind like that.
And that's the strategy that you kind of saw here
where they're trying to keep that wing down.
But I was keeping it steady and they were going back and forth.
I was just keeping it steady down.
So the captain said: "Okay, well,
that worked, but I wouldn't make that your muscle memory habit".
So imagine this was a 747.
You were to add an extra engine right here.
That engine most likely would have slapped into the ground
and you would have had a pod strike.
So this wing down strategy works in some cases with some planes.
But it's not something you want to have in your muscle memory,
because as these planes get bigger,
it works less and less as you saw what happened here.
Aviation is humbling for, I'd say, 99% of the pilots out there.
You're always going to be going through, feeling uncomfortable,
not being the best at what you're doing.
And you're going to have to keep learning and improving.
And there's always different scenarios. And that's what makes flying fun.
There's always things that are changing, different crosswinds,
different things that you haven't seen or experienced before.
So you're going to have to be humble.
If you think you're the very, very best,
you might very well be.
There's maybe one or two percent of people out there that just excel.
They just naturally are amazing pilots.
I'm not one of those people.
I always have to work and eat a lot of humble pie.
So just realize that that's going to happen
as you go through your career in aviation.
It's going to be humbling.
You're going to feel stupid sometimes, and you just have to keep working at
finding out what you did well and also
keeping in mind what you did bad and looking at ways you can improve
and do those things better.
And a lot of ways you can get that feedback
is from asking the other pilots that you're with.
Most pilots aren't going to just offer criticism
unless you're going through flight school.
But if you ask them:
"Hey, what could I have done better here?"
An experienced pilot will tell you:
"Hey, I think you could have done this, that or that.
This is what I would have done in this situation"
Some pilots won't offer that unless you ask them.
So just keep that in mind.
And especially when you're new on an aircraft,
always ask those questions because there's a lot you can learn.
And not every time are people going to offer that advice to you.
You can see as the planes coming in, these wings are rocking.
And when you're unstable and the wings
are rocking as much as they are right here,
it's just not worth it to land
because you could seriously damage the aircraft
or get yourself into an accident.
The smart move would have been right here
to just do a go around and try it all again.
Could have been wind shear,
It could have been a bunch of things.
But they should have gone around, in my opinion,
and come in and try it again.
At the end of the day, you want to make safety your priority.
If you do a go round, you're not going to be in trouble.
If you slap a wing or you damage an engine and they can go back and see
just how much that plane was banking
regardless of the video being out there.
They can go back and actually pull the information
and see all the inputs that you were doing.
And if they could see you were making the controls
go left, right, left, right, that low to the ground,
they're going to know who was doing what to the aircraft.
And you don't want to get in trouble for it.
You do a go around, you come back in and say:
"Hey, we weren't stable. We came back in and we landed"
You're never going to get in trouble for that.
So close.
Good old Manchester.
You notice how, as the plane came in, the pilots kept the wings level,
even though it looks like they were in a bit of a crosswind.
That's kind of what I was referring to in the earlier video.
See here how the wings are level?
There was some power mismanagement is what caused this go around.
But I just want to show you a much better example
in comparison to the previous video
of keeping those wings level instead of rocking back and forth with the crosswind.
The reason this aircraft had to do a go around
is probably from power mismanagement.
Either they kept the power in too long as they were coming in to land
or they came in too fast.
It was one of the two.
You'll see here, right as they're about to touch down,
the plane kind of goes back up again.
If you're coming in too fast and you do a little flare,
the plane will actually balloon up.
So whether that's from wind because it was too windy
or they left the power in too long, it doesn't really matter.
Technically, we're supposed to land in the first third of the runway.
We're aiming for these bars that are a thousand feet down the runway.
Those are your touchdown marker. We're aiming for that.
But technically, we're required to land the first third of the runway.
And these pilots absolutely made the right decision by doing a go around.
Let me show you.
This is the airport diagram of Manchester where they're trying to land.
They were trying to land somewhere down in this section right here.
Now, look here on the chart.
You see we have Kilo 3, Kilo 4 and Kilo 5 .
Look where they're at and relationship to the runway.
When watch this video again,
you're going to see kind of how far down the runway they actually were.
If you see the signs there now, you'll see just how far down the runway they were.
So the amount of time they were going to have to stop
was getting shorter and shorter.
And it's only a ten thousand foot runway.
And that is a long distance, but not when you're talking about planes of this size.
The pilot that was flying did a really good job here.
They made the decision to do a go around, which was the safest decision.
I know that as a passenger, when you do a go around,
you feel nervous and uncomfortable.
But the reality is it should be the opposite,
because if you as a passenger are in the middle of a go around
and you get like: "Oh, my gosh, what's going on?"
What you should be thinking is
these pilots are making the safest decision to get us on the ground again,
not these pilots messed something up
or there's some problem or anything like that.
What you should be thinking is:
"These pilots are choosing to make the safest choice
which is to do a go around and come back in and land again".
Which is exactly what happened.
I know some pilots feel that by doing a go around, it's kind of like a failure.
But that's not a failure.
What would have been a failure in this situation is
had this A380 landed on the runway
and then slammed on the brakes,
it would have been very uncomfortable for all the passengers
and they may not have stopped in time.
So now you're in the grass or in the mud
or whatever is at the end of the runway there
and now you're there.
You have a real problem.
Now, that would have been a failure.
But doing the go around,
no one's going to be in any trouble for that.
The power mismanagement, every pilots done it.
I've done it a lot of times.
It happens.
Doing the go around, 100% was the right choice.
Okay, so this pilot is making a good, safe decision for the people on the aircraft.
And at the end of the day, you're going to be getting on the ground safely.
And that's the most important thing.
And then the other thing that I want you to notice here is
as they take off and I've said it a bunch of different times,
but notice, right as the video ends,
I wish I had the rest of this video,
but right as the video ends, you'll see them actually start to put the gear up,
which it was really cool.
So they basically got everything done that they needed to do
and they did really the right choice.
So even though these pilots floated,
they kept their wings level,
they did a go around and they got the gear up.
They got it all done right.
Doing a burnout.
Can't get them to move.
I had a few people actually send me this clip and ask me,
"Were the brakes on or what was going on?"
What happens is when that tug hooks up,
when the push back hooks up there,
they're speaking with us and they'll say:
"Release your brakes".
On some planes, there's a red light on the gear there
that lets that guy know
that the brakes have been released.
If the pilots had had the brakes on in the parking brake set,
I don't think this plane would have moved at all.
It looks like with the wetness that’s on the ramp
and these painted lines here that they're actually just slipping
when they're trying to push back the aircraft.
As a pilot, I've been taxiing before and getting over these painted lines.
When your plane is light and the ground is wet,
your plane will just slip as you taxi over these things.
And it doesn't look like you had enough traction or momentum
to get the plane moving back.
And you obviously aren't going to want to go too fast.
Now, that's a really good perspective on just how heavy these tugs are.
So if you want to see a 747 knocking over one of those tugs,
check out this video here.
And if you want to see some pilots
arguing with Air traffic control, watch this video up here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.