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've been sent this skydiving clip from a bunch of people in the 74 crew.
So if you have a video that you want to see in this series,
the two easiest places to send to me my Instagram or the free forum 74gear.com
Let's get into it!
I was watching this. This is kind of a bit of a side note
but I was watching this and
I started to get a bunch of anxiety.
When I asked some of you guys on Instagram, I think it was,
what we should do when the channel hits a million.
I had a lot of different really good suggestions actually.
But one of the suggestions I got a lot of was go skydiving.
And I'm not sure why you guys are looking for me to have a code brown situation like
fly plane with one engine or an engine failure,
Sure! I can do that. I can do a bunch of different things but
the level of anxiety that I have
as I watch these guys climbing out of this airplane,
I don't know, it's just this level of anxiety now.
My grandfather was a guy that was one of the original people
that used to jump out of the planes in the Army.
101st Airborne.
He was one of the guys that originally did that during WWII.
I guess you could say it's in my blood but as
I'm watching these guys climb out of the plane
I'm thinking like: "I don't see...
That does not look comfortable or exciting to me".
But, it has really nothing to do with this video.
I'm just kind of imagining myself there in this situation
because it's a cool shot from the helmet cam there.
I just had to mention that.
All right! Let's watch this video!
For any of you that have traveled a lot in your life,
you may have experienced a situation which
I have as a passenger a few different times
and that's being told by the flight attendants that you can't move your seat
or being told you need to go to a different area of the plane.
And the reason for that is weight and balance.
If you're not familiar with the seesaw, let
me show you a picture of why this is relevant.
This is one of my favorite things to do as a kid and just for the record
I'm not this little ginger kid. That's not me.
These two kids, because they're similar weights,
can play and go on this seesaw back and forth.
And not have any issues, right?
But in this example here, it's not going to work.
I am also not this kid either.
Obviously, you have a bunch of weight on one side of the seesaw
and not the other side of the seesaw.
And that's kind of what's happening in the video with this clip here on the plane.
You have a bunch of people on the back of the plane,
probably only one pilot in the front of the plane.
So it's kind of a similar situation.
If you've ever seen the video inside of a plane,
you may have seen something like this before.
This is called the Trim Wheel.
Essentially, this wheel keeps the plane level as you're going through flight
and it keeps things balanced if you walk to the front or the back of the plane.
Or the flight attendants bring the galley cart somewhere around the plane.
This thing will keep the plane level.
Now, if you're really small or you're really big and you
see the opposite version of you getting onto a plane,
and they go to the opposite end of the plane,
there's really no reason to be worried.
There are advantages and disadvantages of having extra weight in the back
or extra weight in the front.
I'm not going to bore you with all the details
of what gives what advantage and disadvantage
because it's not really relevant to this video here.
But there are advantages to both and there's no reason to panic if you see...
If you're sitting in the front of the plane and you're 100 pounds, and you see
some person that weighs 300 or 400 pounds going to the last row of the plane,
it's nothing to worry about.
However, as the plane gets bigger it gets less and less of a problem.
And so as the plane gets smaller, it becomes a bigger and bigger problem.
If you're in a very small plane and you weigh
100 pounds and you're sitting at the front
and there's only one other person on the plane and he's weighing 400 pounds
and he's sitting at the very back of the plane,
that could be a problem.
You see here is the nose starts going up?
That is something that you don't want to see
happen especially when you're going slow like this.
And the reason I know they're going slow is because skydiving planes go slow
in order for people to get out and jump
so they don't have a bunch of wind hitting them when they get out of the plane.
That's something that a lot of people don't realize about skydiving planes
and I think it's funny because in movies you always see
the people blow off the door and then go
jumping out of a plane like it's no big deal
and the plane's flying at normal speeds or faster because
you always hear the engines revving up
as they're going down which makes no sense but
you'll always see those skydiving guys jump out of the plane at a very fast speed
which their face would probably get peeled off. Not literally.
But it would be a very uncomfortable experience.
So when you go skydiving in this normal plane,
the pilots will slow the plane down so that way it's
less aggressive when you get outside of the aircraft.
You'll notice here that the flaps are out
which is something the pilots do to allow the plane to fly a lot slower
and be very stable in the sky.
The other thing to realize is that when your plane is flying extra slow,
you are at a higher risk of stalling the aircraft.
Which is when you see that nose go up the plane is about to stall.
Watch what happens next.
Despite these skydivers getting thrown off the plane and not being prepared for it or
not being ready for it,
this cameraman did an amazing job following and tracking this plane
as it flew around through the sky.
And almost hit some of the other skydivers which
you got to commend this guy because he
wasn't expecting to get thrown off the plane
but he kept that camera and focused on exactly
where that plane was flying the whole time
which is an amazing job.
I'm just hoping that if I was a pilot in the scenario
I wouldn't look something like this guy from "Flight",
screaming and crying as he went down towards the ground.
The plane stalled for a couple of different reasons
but I'm going to put the responsibility on the pilot here.
And that's because as the pilot, you are responsible
for the safety and the safe flight of an aircraft.
So in this situation, even though the skydivers
were piling up towards the back of the plane,
it is still the pilot's responsibility to safely fly that plane.
The other thing you'll notice here is that the
plane keeps getting into looks like a stall
and an additional spin.
Again, this is a really cool video in the way it looks shot
like if the pilot was in control this whole
time, it'd be like: "Hey! This is really cool!"
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case and that's
probably why a lot of you sent me this video.
There's something that we do at the airlines.
We get a bunch of additional training that a general aviation pilot
or a skydiving pilot may not get.
And one of the things that they teach us, is about what's called a secondary stall.
So what they'll do is they'll take your plane, in the simulator of course,
so take the plane up to 35 or 36,000 feet
and up at that altitude, they'll make you stall the plane.
And what you learn is that as you stall the plane that very high altitude,
it takes a long time to recover.
And the thing that you have to be careful of and something that they train you on is
not to create a secondary stall
because it takes a long time for that airspeed to build up at a higher altitude.
That's not normally an altitude that you're doing stalls at,
at 35,000 feet, right?
So, they stall the plane up.
It shows you a long time to get the altitude and the speed
but you lose a lot of altitude as you go down and as your speed starts to build up.
The risk that you run is that if you yank too hard back on the controls,
if you yank hard back,
You can actually put the plane in a stall a second time.
And there's a real danger for that
and that's why we do the training for it because
somebody has obviously done that in real life.
So as they train us for that,
it's something that you learn inherently after you do it again and again.
It's something we do every time or not every time
but we do it a lot when we go to the simulator.
And that teaches you that if you were ever in this situation that you're training,
you should go back to that.
And that's not to pull aggressively back.
However, that's a simulator and this is real life.
So you could possibly see the pilot get nervous
and then be: "Oh my gosh!"
and want to pull back because he's on a steep dive towards the ground.
You notice here how it looks like he keeps stalling and getting back into a spin
and he keeps going down?
You would expect that he would just get the wings level,
let the speed pick up and roll out
but that's not what happens.
Now from my experience when I've done this in the simulator,
you'll lose five to ten thousand feet in the stall.
And that's a very uncomfortable feeling because
as a pilot when you go through flight school,
you're trying to, I don't know, at least when I went through
you're trying to maintain altitude which
isn't a thing I think that they teach anymore
but it was a thing that you got taught.
So what happened was,
you had guys fighting with the plane in order to maintain altitude
or lose minimum amount of altitude things like that.
And so what would happen is that in the simulator,
you're gonna lose five to ten thousand feet which seems like a lot,
but you're gonna lose all that in order to pick up enough speed
to get the plane safely to recover.
But by yanking back even harder
and getting into a secondary stall, you're going to lose a lot more
because the plane is now stalled all over again
and so it now needs to recover and do the whole procedure again.
The air is a lot thinner up there,
so it means it's going to take longer for the plane
to pick up speed in order to get out of the stall.
So when you yank back like that,
put yourself into a secondary stall
it's dangerous. You're going to lose more altitude.
Now, they had plenty of altitude and
I don't know the guy, I don't know how many times the pilot
tried to recover here but
obviously they ended up recovering, everybody
lived from this situation which is awesome.
But as you got lower and lower to the ground,
the air would get higher,
he could probably be a little bit tougher on the controls
and that's one of the advantages of being an airline pilot.
Because we get to go in the simulator so much
and they get to show us a lot of different things
and that's to make it safe for everybody on the plane.
If we, for some reason, got into a stall at 35,000 feet
which, I just can't imagine the scenario that a pilot would do that
but let's just say it happened, you want to train for all those scenarios.
So had this pilot let the nose go over, let the wings be level,
picked up speed and then slowly and gently pulled back on the controls
and leveled the plane off? It would have been fine.
My guess is that they pulled back aggressively and didn't get the power-up
and therefore, got himself into another secondary stall or spin.
And which is understandable.
You're not planning for that situation to be that way
and then all of a sudden, you hit a stall and now you're in a spin.
And people can panic.
That's just the reality of the situation.
As soon as the nose went over here, had the pilot just rolled his wings level,
added a bunch of power,
picked up the air speed,
it would have been fine.
But you'll see, he keeps getting himself into a secondary spin and stall.
And I'm sure in some of the comment sections people say:
"Oh, the skydivers shouldn't have spent that much time on the back of the plane
and the pilot wasn't expecting that".
But the reality is, as the pilot, you would have a talk with the guys
before they gonna jump out there
or the guys and girls whoever's jumping out the back,
but you're gonna have a talk with him.
And you should know in this situation where they're doing a formation dive
meaning they're all going to clump up and jump off at the same time,
you're going to want to add some extra speed.
If you have that extra speed, it keeps your plane some buffer, some safety.
I always talk about having some safety margins, not leaving yourself in a corner
and that would be one of those things.
You would say:
"Hey! You're all going to pile up on the back
part of the plane at the same time together?
Okay! But I'm going to fly faster because I'm not going
to have a stall, or a spin or any of these situations."
So that's how they could have avoided that situation by keeping more power in
for both engines, not just one but both engines.
Keeping both power and pushing the plane forward faster.
That faster speed is going to make it worse for the skydivers
as far as the wind that's hitting them,
but better for the plane and preventing it from getting into a stall.
At the end of the day, as the pilot, you're responsible
for the safe flight of everybody that's on there
and this was safe.
Everybody ended off okay
but not safe to the level that you should be aiming for.
I've talked with some skydivers and some pilots that fly King Airs
and have jumped out of King Airs and I asked them,
do they reduce the power on that side that the people are jumping out of.
I've heard both ways.
Some pilots will reduce the power on one side
which creates a whole other bunch of problems
but they reduce the power on the one side so there's
less wind hitting the skydivers if they're jumping off.
But then, that creates a trickier, riskier situation
for the pilot when they're flying the plane
because you have a bunch of power on one engine.
Very little power on the other engine.
And the reason they're doing that is so that the prop wash
the air that's getting pushed back from that prop
is not that bad for the skydivers that are back there
so it's not like ripping their face-off.
Now, speaking about ripping your face off,
as a guy who's been told that I have a face for radio,
if you want to see some of the mean comments that people have left me,
check out this video here.
And if you want to see something else,
another planet struggling to fly,
check out this video up here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.