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.
In this video, we have a plane that takes off,
but can't seem to climb.
One that lands so hard
it actually bends the airframe
and another plane
which is able to land three different times
on almost three different sets of tires.
It's pretty impressive.
Let's get into it.
I have no idea where this clip is taking place,
but I am 100% in agreement with the pilot in the back doing this.
I would honestly be feeling the exact kind of way as that person who is
screaming because they're flying, but they're not getting any higher.
They're just continuing to fly forward.
It seems like more likely than not,
it's actually the ground is going down.
The altitude of the ground is going down,
which is what's making it look like they're getting a little higher,
but they should be climbing at a much better angle than that.
There's two possible scenarios.
One, you have a density altitude issue,
meaning it could be a very hot, very humid day at a high airport,
a high altitude airport.
Let's say Mexico city.
This isn't Mexico city airport.
But as an example, it's a high altitude airport.
It can get very hot and humid.
So if you have a high altitude airport, very hot and very humid,
the plane doesn't have the same performance as it would on a cold,
lower altitude.
So let's take Alaska, Anchorage in the middle wintertime.
It's very cold.
The air is very thick and that allows the plane to perform and do better.
On a hot, humid day on a high altitude, the plane doesn't perform as well.
So that's one possible scenario.
The other possible scenario is you have too many people in the plane
or too much weight in the plane.
Kind of like if you saw the American Made that I did with Tom cruise,
the drug cartel were trying to just pack his plane full.
They didn't really care.
They're just like, take it all,
take it all and then take the fat guy with you.
And he's like,
no, I can't take all this weight.
So you have two guys in front of the plane who are arguing.
You have me in the back screaming,
and then you have someone recording out of the back of the plane.
So there's possibly four different people that are on here,
but the person that's recording out of the back of the plane
is unwilling to look forward.
They're just looking at the back thinking,
I hope this works out okay.
Next I need to mention of course how they rotated.
And they got so far away from the runway in such a short distance here.
This is really far off of course.
To get the best performance and get away from the ground quickly,
the best thing you can do generally speaking is keep your wings level.
You'll notice in most commercial aircraft, when we take off,
before we make a bank to the left or to the right,
we keep our wings level until we get to 400 or so feet.
Now that's not always the case, but generally speaking,
we do that to get away from the ground before
we turn the left or to the right.
Because when we make that turn,
we reduce the capabilities of our wings to help us climb up
because helping it turn to the left or to the right.
However,
you'll notice that they took off here
and have slid all the way to the left side of the runway here.
That means they were at some level of a bank to get away from the runway.
Now, for those of you that are fearful flyers and you're thinking,
oh man, so I live in Mexico city or Bogota.
It's a high altitude airport.
It's a hot day. It's humid. Like what's going to happen.
Well, the engines on a commercial aircraft when you're taking off,
they're usually working at a reduced power setting.
We're not usually taking off at a max blast.
And there's a lot of times where I've taken off from Bogota,
which is a high altitude.
I don't know, 8,000 feet or so.
It's a high altitude airport and even with my 747,
we don't always take off max blast, right?
So it's not always that it's a high risk on a commercial aircraft,
but on a smaller plane like this,
it's definitely a higher risk.
I've taken off in a small plane at an altitude of 8,000 or so feet
and on takeoff and on climb out,
the entire time the stall warning horn was going off.
Meaning the air was so thin that the plane was on the brink of stalling.
It's not dangerous.
You just have to know what you're doing when you're flying the aircraft.
But it's something to be aware of.
That doesn't happen to commercial aircraft.
And there's a lot of performance that's set in place to make sure
that there's enough climb performance, that if an engine fails,
that it's still able to continue to climb
and do an evasive maneuver to get away from mountains or anything like that.
All that stuff has been laid out on a commercial aircraft.
When you're flying a single engine plane like that, a propeller plane,
a general aviation aircraft, those rules don't apply.
Another thing I want you to notice here is this windsock
and look at the direction that the wind is coming from.
So assuming there weren't any mountains or any restrictions
from turning that direction,
they could have turned that way and gotten some extra lift from the wind.
This may be one of those scenarios where you say, okay,
we're going to turn and we're going to do a slight gradual bank into the wind.
Because by doing that,
now you have the wind kind of giving you an extra 20 knots of boost
and that's going to help your plane be able to perform
because your engine is obviously working at full speed,
trying to make it fly.
And it's not going fast enough to climb.
If you were to turn into the wind,
it's like speeding up and going extra 20 knots quicker.
And so by turning into the wind,
you can continue your climb and get away from the ground
and get away from all the dangerous buildings.
So this guy is very close to the tops of these buildings.
I would be very uncomfortable.
And so was the person in the back who is screaming.
I would feel a lot like them.
Let's see this next video.
That landing was so hard that it actually bent the airframe,
but not probably in the way that you expected.
Take a look at this video again.
You see here, the plane hits so hard it went back up in the air again?
Which takes a really hard landing for that to happen.
It's never ever good to bend your aircraft because
you're going to have a reputation for that.
So that's something you never want to have happen.
But when you go through flight school, it's common to bounce the plane.
Have your landing so hard, you bounce back up in the air again.
I've done it a lot of times.
However, on a commercial aircraft that is not that easy to do.
I've had some very firm landings.
I mean very firm.
Glad that nobody videoed my landing, firm landings
and I've never bounced back up in the air again.
So those landings, when you're going to hit so hard,
you're going to bounce back up.
It's never good.
You really hit it hard to get these planes to go back up in the air again.
You see the plane bounces here.
And then the same thing that happens I've talked about in a smaller aircraft.
And that's where it starts to porpoise down the runway.
The nose goes over and it touches the ground first.
And that means the entire weight of the aircraft is sitting right here on the nose.
These planes are designed to take a heavy impact, but on the main gear,
not on the nose.
And before America's next top fighter pilot gets out there and tells me,
well, these planes should be designed to take nose impact for landing.
Just realize that these people who are flying these planes are professional pilots.
And so we get trained to not land on the nose.
So for the amount of money that it would take to make an aircraft
be able to take a nose landing
while weighing this amount is just not necessary.
Now on a smaller aircraft,
all the planes that you learned to fly on,
Cessnas and Diamonds and Cirruses,
those planes can take a nose landing.
I mean not ridiculous amount of load,
but the typical porpoise that you see.
This that you see here,
if that had happened on a small plane, that plane would've been fine.
I've done literally that on a small plane.
So it doesn't really matter.
But once you get out of a big aircraft, there's a lot more weight,
a lot more momentum.
And the plane is not set up to handle that type of impact on the nose.
A contributing factor what caused or what may have caused this initial hard bounce
was that the plane was landing in gusty conditions.
And what can happen is when you're 5 or 10 feet off the ground,
if you're in a gust and all of a sudden the gust goes away,
you lose all that air speed right away and you weren't planning on it.
It's very hard to know when you're in a gust, as you're getting into land,
it's very hard.
So that 5 or 10 feet,
if you end up, just kind of floating a little bit and you're in a gust,
boom, that air speed goes away and you just slam into the ground.
I know, I've done it a bunch of times.
And I've flown, one of the aircraft that used to fly was a Jetstream.
A Jetstream 31, 32.
It has very stout landing.
So if you don't put it in smooth, it will let you know.
So it's really easy to slam that plane.
And I was flying that thing around Texas.
So we get a lot of windy, gusty days.
So there was times where I thought,
oh, okay, this is looking really good.
Nope, we're in a gust.
And then bam!
Slam it in.
And that's what happens.
And that's what happened or possibly happened here.
The difference is is that if you let the nose go over,
you can get into trouble,
which is what happened and why this airframe got bent.
Another possible scenario is the pilot bounce
and didn't realize they were back up in the air
and they pushed the nose onto the ground to help improve the steering.
But in reality,
they pushed the nose down before the mains were on there.
And so it bent the aircraft.
On a commercial aircraft,
you want to get the nose onto the ground as quickly as possible.
And the reason for that is because that allows you to steer.
So you'll see on smaller aircraft, guys will keep the nose up
and okay, cool.
They're playing around and that's fine.
But on a larger aircraft like this,
you don't want to keep the nose up too long,
especially on a windy day because your nose's wheel is steering
and your rudder are going to work together
to keep you going straight down the runway.
So you're going to want to get that nose down,
but you want to fly it down.
So it's kind of a tricky balance.
You don't want to slam it down because you can injure or damage the aircraft.
You don't want to let it fall down,
meaning you keep it up so long that the air speed bleeds off
and then it slams into the ground.
And then you just have to fly it down.
And that just takes experience.
So by getting the mains on,
you're going to get that nose down quickly.
Now, maybe it's possible that these pilots thought,
okay, our mains are down.
Let's get the nose down.
And they kind of pushed it down and that possibly caused it.
I don't know.
There was no real interview from these pilots that I could find
explaining what was going on.
And when they talked about this.
It's one airline I was at,
they were talking about this
and anyway,
it's one of those things there's...
I didn't see any report explaining exactly what the pilots say happened,
but those are all possible scenarios of what could have caused this.
So there was a lot of factors going on.
You had gusty winds,
you had a bounce slamming, which is never good.
And then you have someone pushing the nose over possibly
with the intention to steer or possibly the plane just nosed over
because that was the way the momentum was carrying it.
I don't really know.
The thing to remember is that
this is a profession where anything could happen to anybody.
So you kind of have to stay humble
because I'll see sometimes pilots and myself included
where you see something go like
I would never do that.
But the reality is is
there's pilots that are very experienced,
a lot more experienced than me.
And they make mistakes.
They miscalculate.
They think crosswind and they put down the wrong foot,
put down the wrong rudder and do something.
There's a lot of things that guys with 20 or 30 years of international flying
heavy jets experiences that they can mess up.
So just realize you have to take everything
and be very humble in this profession
because it's going to humble you if you're not humble.
And then if you're running around telling everybody like
I'm the greatest pilot ever
and then you do something stupid like this,
people are going to let you know.
So you want to be professional,
be the best possible pilot you can be,
but also be humble and realize that you could make a mistake.
And that's part of it.
That was actually very similar to what almost happened in the last clip,
except they almost got all three tires and three separate landings.
Impressive.
First, you're going to notice that the left tire hits on the plane.
Then it goes back up in the air.
Then the right tire hits just moments before the nose hits.
You can see the smoke actually come out of that right tire
right before the nose touches down.
This was very close to being a repeat of the video we just saw.
On a large aircraft, it's very important.
I talked about it a bunch,
but keeping your wings level as soon as you touch down on the ground.
As your aircraft gets smaller,
it's less necessary because you have a lot more space and distance
between your engines and the ground.
So you can have a deeper bank angle as you come in and touch down.
Is not necessarily recommended, but you can do it.
On a 747, maybe a triple seven.
I don't know, maybe an Airbus A80.
I'm not familiar with what their rules are,
but you can't put a big bank angle because if you do,
your engines will slap into the ground and you're going to be in trouble.
However, on a smaller aircraft like this,
you can put a bit of a bank angle in there to cut down the wind
if it's pushing you off the runway.
Watch what happens here though.
The wind is actually coming from the left.
You can see that here in the windsock.
And now it's possible
they aren't properly lined up with the runway since we can't see the runway here.
But they're actually getting pushed to the right.
And the pilot is making a last minute correction and gets his left tire
to hit the ground first.
But there's another possibility.
And that's the pilot was too soon in putting the wind correction in
and then smashed the left tire down,
which actually bounced it back up in the air
and put the right tire down on the ground first,
which is exactly what you don't want.
You don't want to have a situation where your wing is high
with the wind getting underneath it
because now you're really going to have to force it down.
So that's never a good situation.
You're always taught to keep the wind side of the wings,
keep that one down because you don't want wind to get underneath it.
So it's possible as they were coming into land,
they made that early correction thinking,
okay, I'm going to just kind of preemptively strike it
and bank it over.
And what happened is it's possible that that's what happened.
And they actually just slammed that tire down in the ground.
Had the wheels gotten down,
had the mains gotten down first because they were pretty level right
until just a second before.
Had they gotten those mains down and then put that in?
That would've worked.
But they've putting it in a little bit too soon.
They got it down, bounce it up and put it back to the other side.
So that's what happened there.
On a larger aircraft, these crosswinds can be a bit trickier
because you're going to have your main landing gear
lined up over the middle of the runway.
But you, because you're so far forward,
looks like you're on the edge of the runway,
which is a bit strange the first couple times you do it.
Because every time that you go through flight school
and your whole life up until this point,
you've been having the idea of always being down the middle,
which is fine.
When you're on a small plane, that's 20 feet long, then yeah,
you can be all the way sideways and you're down the middle of the runway.
And that's the side picture that you're used to seeing.
When you have a plane that's a couple hundred feet long
and you have a strong crosswind,
the main landing gear will be over the middle
and you'll be looking down the edge of the runway.
And the thing is is that if you do that correctly
and have your main landing gear over where it's supposed to be,
over the center of the runway,
as soon as you straighten out that plane, hopefully five feet off the runway,
you don't have to worry about the wind pushing you.
You can keep your wings level as soon as the mains touchdown,
then you can put the correction in there.
It's a lot that's going on.
So it's easy to mess it up.
It's easy to anticipate.
We've all anticipated something that hadn't happened yet, especially in flying.
And when you do that and it gets caught on video, it ends up somewhere here.
I've done it. A lot of pilots have done it.
It just takes practice and continuing to try to perfect your craft.
That's the reality.
If you want to see some pilots who are struggling
with their crosswind landings,
and I kind of explain it in more detail,
check out this video here.
If you want to see somebody who knows nothing about aviation,
but talk like they know more than I do.
Check out this video up here.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Until then,
keep the blue side up.