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.
Now, in this Viral debrief,
I have a clip that could be very disturbing to some of you.
So I will warn you before we get to that clip.
So, don't worry about that.
But if you have a clip that you wanna see in this series,
the two easiest places to send them to me,
my Instagram or the free forum 74gear.com.
Let's get into it!
This is a really short clip
but there's actually a lot going on here.
And those planes that you saw landing,
those planes are used for firefighting.
So from the perspective of the boat and the guys that are in the boat,
this is my question.
You just watched this flying firefighter land.
And now you're clearly looking at another plane that's coming into land
for the exact same reason.
These planes are coming into land to get more water,
probably because they're fighting a fire somewhere,
but you're in your boat and you think,
Hmm, there's a gap here.
I'm gonna split the gap.
And I'm just gonna shoot across this way where this other plane is clearly
coming into land.
That would be a very hard plane
not to see yellow and red up in the sky.
You just watch one land.
So you have an idea and you know that there's another one behind it.
And you think
I'm just gonna go ahead and make it across this way.
And you didn't make it by very much.
From the pilot's perspective,
I'm not sure what the pilots are thinking either,
because look how close this wingtip is to the boat.
It's so close.
I feel very uncomfortable.
Something that reminds me of this is just a week or so ago.
I was in Chicago.
We were landing on the south side of the airport.
We had to park on the north side.
We asked like three times to go to the north side,
but they wanted us to land there.
So we had a really long taxi.
Now I was sitting in the third seat, the middle seat,
which means there was two pilots up there.
I was sitting in the middle and they'd call that "The smart seat".
You're responsible for making a lot of the different radio calls on the ground
and just overseeing everything.
So people don't miss something because from back there,
you have just a better perspective of everything that's going on.
And that's why they call it the smart seat.
We were taxing along and we had to cross a service road.
It's a road that they used at the airports for driving catering trucks
and fuel trucks and all those things.
So there's special roads for them.
And then there's taxiways for us.
Well, we saw one car that was parked there waiting, but out of the corner of my eye,
I saw this truck kind of come around the corner and he was going really fast.
He was in a catering truck.
And so I said to the captain,
because it was on the left side.
Hey, this guy on your left,
I don't think he's going to stop.
And so we said, okay, we'll just keep going.
Now he was maybe a hundred meters away as we were pulling up.
And we were just closing in getting closer and closer.
And as we were pulling up, he goes,
he's not gonna stop.
So as he came across, which is not what they're supposed to do,
they're supposed to give way to us.
But he came across seeing that there was another guy that was parked there and
the captain put on all the lights. We lit him up.
And now you can imagine a 747 with all the lights on. It's really bright.
So if he didn't know what he was doing before,
he was really aware at that point as he drove across our path,
what was going on that he made a mistake.
But we stopped.
We slowed down to let him go because at the end of the day, us hitting him,
even though it's not gonna damage our plane very much, just a little bit,
you know, but in this case,
if that wingtip were to hit that boat,
that'd be a lot of damage to the plane.
It would be a lot of,
possible an accident for the pilots getting spun around like that.
And then the people on the boat would be hurt.
It's a lot and they're coming into land like it's no big deal.
It's just...
it kind of blows my mind.
I get, when you're fighting a fire,
maybe you're,
you know your plane better and the distance, but that was very close.
That wasn't a lot of space between the wingtip and where that boat was.
If Tugboat Tony over there on his boat had gone any slower as he'd crossed that
landing path for these firefighting planes,
there's a good chance that wingtip would've hit the plane,
destroying the plane, destroying the boat.
And maybe these firefighters are better as far as knowing the wingtip distance
and all that stuff.
And they're better pilots.
And they're obviously more risky pilots because they do much higher risk flying
than what I do.
When I show up on the plane,
my biggest risk is like my peanut butter and jelly sandwich doesn't have
the same balance of peanut butter and jelly that I would like.
These guys that are out fighting fires,
are doing some really crazy stuff to help people from their homes burning.
So obviously they're a little bit more risk.
They're less risk adverse in doing things than I would be doing.
Cuz if I saw that situation with that boat going across like that, I'd be like,
Okay, I'd either slow down a lot and let him get really far outta the way.
I move to the side a little bit
or I'd just take another little loop around and
come in and land again.
They don't have a lot of time though.
The thing is when you're fighting a fire, it's it's about moving quickly.
So I understand what they're doing as far as for getting it done.
I just can't understand how the guy in the boat thought this was a great idea.
And that's a risky move for the pilot to land
and have your wingtip that close to something else.
And you have no control over this guy on a boat
who's just kind of cruising along.
You don't know if he's gonna stop or have an engine failure or whatever,
and then block your path.
And now you're committed into this landing situation.
I don't know, ballsy move.
Oh! The door's open.
This looks like an older 737 and it's an airline that's based out of Bogota.
I see them a lot when I'm flying or out of Colombia, when I'm down there,
you'll see them.
They have a few different planes and one of them are these older 737.
And I am familiar with doors opening up on the plane while I'm flying them.
I've had it happen twice, just never on a 747.
What's really crazy is if you look here right before they actually touch down,
this door is wide open.
Meaning it's creating all kinds of drag on the plane because the air is actually
getting shoved inside the plane as well.
I mentioned before when I had a door open on a two different aircraft,
the first one was the first day of flight school on my multi-engine aircraft.
I forgot to close the door hard enough.
And when I didn't close the door hard enough when we took off the door open,
that was one of the first times that an instructor had used a real life example
to teach aviate, navigate, communicate.
Like fly the plane, the door's open.
You're not gonna fall out.
Just fly the plane, come back in around and land.
Not a big deal, but that aviate, navigate, communicate.
That was one of the first times that I really was like,
oh, I see why this is important because I would kept trying to close the door.
There was no way that thing was going to close.
And she just said, Hey, don't worry about it.
We'll just come back in land it happens all the time.
I don't know if it happens all the time, because it only happened to me once.
So that was my experience with that.
And after that point I always slammed my doors shut
and verified before I went anywhere.
So that's how it happened first day on that plane.
And then the first day, on my very first charter that I was flying
the captain, there was a little door, near the captain's side that would close
and he forgot to close that.
And as soon as we rotated, that door flew open.
So now my rule is if I can get through the first day of flying
without a door flying open, I feel pretty good about flying on that plane.
And luckily the first day flying the 747, no doors came open.
Now obviously the crew had to tell the operations,
they were coming back into land or the ground crew was monitoring the frequency here,
because there's all these people outside filming so they know something's going on
and they're outside filming.
And somebody in this group who's filming is gonna be responsible
for not having properly secured that door.
How it works for me on the 747 is once all the loading is complete,
I'll go down and walk the deck.
If let's say there's just two of us.
I'll go down and walk the deck.
We call it.
You saw it in that vlog video I did.
And we walked the deck and verify all the cargos properly secured.
We verified that the door in the back is closed.
We verify all the stuff.
So they're checking all the stuff,
the load masters and the guys that are down there are checking everything then
we're verifying that they did everything correctly,
which 99.9% of the time they have done everything correctly.
So you verify everything that they're doing.
So there's no questions and you're eventually gonna be responsible for it
if there is a problem, right?
If there's a load shift or there's a problem down there,
you're going to be ultimately responsible for it.
So you'll go do that inspection.
And then the next thing you'll do is as I come up the steps,
getting ready to close the main door that people are walking in and out of which
we don't use for cargo loading.
We just use that for people getting in and out of the aircraft.
They close that door and I verify that that door gets closed.
Now we have sensors on the flight deck that let us know if the door's not closed,
but I'd rather just physically watch that door close and get locked into place.
They check it to make sure that it's all good,
but I like to verify it,
like why not just take the extra two or three seconds and watch that thing close
and then watch it kind of makes this little pop once it's really locked in.
I like to look at that and make sure that that's done.
So I know that door's not coming open.
And so that's what we do and we double check that.
That's obviously not what happened here.
Now as a guy who's had two doors open in flight,
I can tell you that the doors love to open
as soon as you take flight.
They don't wanna open during while you're taxing around on the ground
or any of that.
They wanna open as soon as you rotate and get up in the air
when it becomes impossible to fix the problem.
And now it's possible that the pilot looked back there and thought it was secured.
I don't know. That's a pretty big door to not have locked in a place,
but there would typically be a sensor that would say,
Hey, this door isn't properly locked.
It's possible though that sometimes you'll have a sensor where it says,
Hey, you're not gonna get a read back. This thing is broken.
So you won't get any feedback.
So now you really have to make sure that it closed.
Obviously that did not happen.
Whether the load master should have probably closed it.
The pilot should have checked it to make sure that it was properly closed,
but they got up on the air and nobody caught it along the way.
So they got up,
realized the door was open.
It would've been extremely loud, very windy,
a lot of drag.
And then they would've had to come back around and land.
Which is crazy.
The thing to remember if you're ever in the situation though,
is don't worry about who forgot to do what.
Just aviate, fly the plane, get back on the ground.
And once you get back on the ground, you can just sort it out afterwards.
Somebody's gonna be in trouble,
but that's not really important until you're on the ground.
There's been a lot of cases where there's been accidents unnecessarily because
pilots try to hide their mess up and they try to hide it by
continuing on with the flight or try to do something.
So these pilots could have said,
okay, let's just fly here.
And let's just pretend that the door blew open and we'll put on our masks.
They could have done all this stuff to try to hide the fact of what happened.
But the reality is
that somebody messed up more than one person messed up with
this door coming open.
So it had they tried to hide that.
There's a good likelihood that a lot of people could have got fired.
What I've experienced from different airlines is
if you're honest and tell the truth
and it was an honest mistake, a lot of times they're gonna let it slide.
If you're being malicious, they're not gonna let that slide.
But an honest mistake, if you say,
Hey, this is what happened.
I thought I checked it. I obviously didn't check it correctly.
And this is what's happened.
And this is what I'm going to going on forward.
You may lose your job but you may not.
But if you lie and try to hide it and say like,
oh, I tried to do this. And I didn't even notice. And then, you know,
and just make up this whole lie.
Well then you're definitely gonna be fired because not only are you messing up
on the job, but you also have no integrity.
So what are they gonna do?
And keep you for something like that.
So you're better to just do what these pilots did, which was
okay, this is messed up.
Let's come back in around and land. And obviously
the plane's not going to pressurize.
They're probably not gonna be able to safely make it to their destination at 10,000 feet.
Colombia is very mountainous.
So you're going to have a lot of terrain that you're not going to be able to get around.
So they didn't really have a lot of choice to lie and try to hide it.
They had to come back around and land, but it's a good learning experience.
If you are at a situation where something has gone wrong,
just go in and land and then sort it out afterwards,
you're better to lose your job than lose your life.
Unlike passenger planes,
cargo planes, obviously the door is different.
You saw how massive that door was.
There is not a door like that on your typical passenger plane
and the people who are responsible for securing the doors on a passenger plane obviously is gonna
be your flight attendant.
There's gonna be someone on the outside who's gonna close the door.
They're gonna check the seal to make sure everything's good.
And then your flight attendants are gonna be there. And usually there'll be two.
And they'll both verify that that door is closed and they'll be sitting there
while the plane is taxing and they'll be sitting there for takeoff.
So believe me when I tell you,
they're gonna make sure that door is closed.
Now, let's just say, hypothetically,
they didn't close the door.
What would happen?
Pretty much the exact same thing, except to be a much, much smaller door.
You saw that plane flying. That was a 737.
So that's a common plane that you'll see.
And you saw that thing flying with that massive door open like that.
Now, if you were back there as a passenger, it would be extremely windy,
like being in a wind tunnel,
but you would be fine and the plane would come back around and land.
So it just kind of shows you just how crazy things can go wrong on a plane and
everything still work out okay.
So if you were to be on a regular passenger plane and the door were to come open,
you'd be able to fly around just like that. It'd be windy.
You would be scared.
You maybe need to change your shorts,
but all around, you'd be fine.
And the flight attendant that was sitting up there
would be very embarrassed as you got off the plane.
Oh, this is the one.
I almost forgot to tell you.
If you hate spiders, you are not going to want to watch this video.
Now I'm just thankful something like this happened in Australia,
where they're used to dealing with some just absolutely enormous spiders and
other things that will kill you.
I don't know if that's one of the killer spiders or not. I don't know.
They have so many crazy things over there that can kill you though.
But in Aussie, I mean,
this is Northern territory, in Aussie just sees it and starts laughing.
There's a lot of people in America I think would just have a panic attack.
If they saw a spider that big crawling around on their aircraft
or be so distracted about what's going on,
they don't even worry about landing the plane.
I was kind of hoping somebody like Steve Irwin was gonna jump out
and just ignore the plane flying,
just to try to get the spider and put it in their hand.
That's obviously not the case,
but these guys were laughing about it and you could hear the prop moving.
So he was obviously not concerned at all about this massive spider running
around on the plane, so good for them.
But they came focused to come in and land.
I don't know that I would.
Spiders don't bother me,
but I don't have spiders typically that big crawling around me
while I'm trying to fly a plane.
If you wanna see someone flying a plane and it looks like
they were flying with spiders, check out this video here.
And if you wanna see someone in a plane that's screaming,
that sounds like there's a spider in the plane.
Check out this video up here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side.