Airline CAPTAIN Debunks 8 Flying Fears

will the wings break under extreme stress what happens if a plane is hit by lightning can the plane land on water we'll find out in today's video [Applause] [Music] hi everyone I'm Mark I'm an Airbus Captain for a commercial airline and you're watching pilot explains and today we're going to go through the most common fears of flying and why you can feel safe on any airliner today [Music] the wings moving completely normal thing they're designed to do that when an airline is designed they design the wings to have a degree of movement in them especially for when you're in turbulence you don't want them rigid it would stress the aircraft when you design an airliner you design the wings to take a maximum amount of load and then they'll build a jig they'll put the airliner in it and they'll bend the wings up until they snap the current Boeing triple seven went 150 percent past its designed limit load the something that would never happen in flight so you're quite safe the wings are not going to go anywhere the new composite Wings on the 787 they actually went up 7.8 meters when you watch them on takeoff you'll see the wings lift up as the lift generated off the wing quite safe they're not going to fall off there's many types of turbulence the one that most people are scared of is clear air turbulence we're flying Along on a nice clear day up at height and all of a sudden the plane starts shaking and bumping around you're quite safe the aircraft is not going to fall out of the sky it's designed to take it there's a variety of reasons it could be a shift in the wind there's great big tunnels of fast-moving air called jet streams as you come in and out of those you get bumps if you're sitting in it you can be sitting there with 200 mile wind behind you and it's smoother silk but when you leave that it gets a bit rough when you're coming into land on a really windy day especially at Manchester if the winds from the north it's coming over the terminal it's coming over it's being churned up by all the stuff that's on the ground that's called mechanical terminas it's not very pleasant but it's not dangerous we train regularly in simulators in bumpy conditions and if we're up at height we have charts that show us where this turbulence will be we know when we're coming towards it so we can mitigate things by slowing the aircraft down slightly it has a special speed to go through bumpy air will know ahead where it's coming because we'll heal people on the radio talking to air traffic control asking is it bumpy ahead I'm getting bumps here I'm at this height it's bumpy here so we can descend or we can climb and we can get out of it so it's quite safe it just feels a bit uncomfortable really some days we're flying around and we know there's thunderstorms around on our flight plans they show on the chart where these storms are so we know when to expect them we have apps that we can look at before we leave and we can see where they are when we're in the aircraft we have a very very good weather radar system and it uses a Doppler radar it sends out a radar from the nose of the aircraft and it picks up large water droplets that you get in the cloud and it bounces back and it paints it on our screen it comes in different grades green is just wet yellow is getting a little bit nasty and red really you really want to avoid red so we can see these storms up ahead even at night on our screen so we know we can turn around and we can go around them and we negotiate with air traffic control and say we want to turn left by x amount of degrees and avoid this weather you've got to clear them at height by at least 20 miles you've got to be over them by at least five thousand feet and you stay well away from them occasionally aircraft will get hit by lightning most of the time you don't even know what's happened sometimes your land and you'll walk around the aircraft on your inspection and you might find a little burn hole the engineers will come and inspect the aircraft and it's back in the air very very quickly sometimes you get a bit more burning but the aircraft is fully shielded against it and the systems aren't affected and all you're going to hear is a little crackle on the radio every time there's a bolt of lightning near you so we're making an approach to an airport there's thunderstorms all in the area we know about them to mitigate this problem we carry extra fuel we can sit there and circle in a holding pattern we can sit there for a significant amount of time and wait for the storms to blow through if they're too bad we can go around them and if they're just not moving we always have at least one diversion airport that we can divert to that will have good weather and we can get in without any problem whatsoever if it's a stormy day we sometimes have two or more airports that we can go to where the weather's perfectly acceptable and we won't have a problem Landing some of you guys might be worried what happens if one of the pilots becomes ill well there's always at least two of us in the flight deck if one of the guys becomes ill then we'll get the cabin crew in we'll give them some oxygen if need be assess this situation they may recover fine they may be able to continue with the flight or they may become what we call incapacitated so they take no further part in that flight the cabin crew may give them some oxygen to see if we can bring them around but if they really can't fly anymore it's no again not a big deal one of us can land the aircraft and also the aircraft can land itself in the extremely rare scenario that both of us are taking unwell some Airlines train their cabin crew how to use the radios they can call for help they can be talked down by train people and set the aircraft up for an automatic Landing where it will land it will stop itself on the runway and everything will be fine again it's nothing to worry about it's the same procedure if we have an unwell pilot to an unwell passenger if they're really not very well we will divert to the nearest airport if you're flying around Europe there's airports everywhere very very easy to get in very very easy to get back out and we try and pick one where we know there's good hospitals what happens if we hit a bird well again it's generally non-event depends where it hits on the aircraft I've had them bounce off the nose before I've heard them hit the wings normally a quick inspection by an engineer once you're on the ground and the aircraft's good to go if it goes through the engine again it's normally a non-event if it goes through the center of the engine the core that requires a bit more of an inspection but if it just goes around the core and through the main blade is again it's not a problem if it hits some probes or does some damage to some sensors they'd have to have a bit more of a look in but generally it's not a big problem I know some people have asked what happens if it hits the windscreen or the windscreens are massively thick that at least nine layers of glass and heating elements and they're heated and they are actually slightly flexible they've got a little bit of give so if a bird hits the windscreen the windscreen has a little bit of give and it bounces off at worst it might crack the outer layer you've still got another eight layers quite safe we have prevention of wildlife around the airports there's a guy drives around and a car he has a flare gun that makes a loud bang it scares the birds off we put all our lights on as we're coming into land and as we take off and that scares the birds away plus the noise of a great big airliner hurtling down the runway gets them out of the way quite well so the next one is a fire on board people are very very worried about this the first thing we do we identify where the fire is if it's in the engines we get an alert in the cockpit we have fire extinguishers in the engines and we put the fire out in the tile we have a little mini engine called an APU auxiliary power unit that supplies electrics and air conditioning when we're on the ground and it can do it in Flight as well again that's got a fire extinguisher we can put that out the most likely cause we see on flights we get the smoke alarm in the toilets going off someone's gone in there had a vape had a cigarette set the smoke alarm off we get a load of alarms going off in the flight deck the cabin crew get a load of alarms and they go in very very quickly and we have procedures we have fire extinguishers on board to put it out even the toilet bins have built-in fire extinguishers so we identify where the fires are coming from and we put it out one of the new ones that's come out recently is we have new procedures for lithium battery fires the same batteries that you have in your phones your laptops and your iPads have procedures for that if we have one of those fires we generally divert the aircraft and get the offending battery off the aircraft in the cockpit there's two main types that we deal with and again every six months we train for this in the simulator we can have smoke coming off the air conditioning systems or we can have electrical smoke there are procedures for that we isolate the system and we just switch it off we have fire extinguishers in the flight deck and like I said we train for this regularly so really there's nothing to worry about the cabin crew have special procedures on board as well they have smoke hooks that Supply them with oxygen they have fireproof gloves and they have their fire extinguishers our cabin crew incredibly highly trained to deal with these fires and again they regularly go for training sessions to deal with these onboard flies the other thing that may happen is on takeoff or Landing if we have an engine fire we stopped the aircraft we know which direction the wind's coming and we position the aircraft so Wind Blows the Flames away from the aircraft this came about after an incident in Manchester many years ago on a British Air Tour 737. so we parked the aircraft we shut the engines down the wind is blowing their flames and the smoke away from the fuselage and the fire crew if it's after table before takeoff they will be there almost immediately and if we're Landing they'll all be sitting there waiting for us as soon as we land that follows down the runway and they'll be there with their special fire trucks that are designed just for Aviation fires and once we've stopped the fire Crews turn up they'll be fighting the fire a cabin crew their main job is to look after you they'll be getting you off that aircraft as quickly as they can they'll be cabin crew on the ground to guide you away from the aircraft telling you which direction to go and we'll make sure everyone's off the captain unfortunately is the last one to leave the aircraft and I have to walk that aircraft and make sure there's no one left now the big concern is what happens if the oxygen supply fails or the cabin depressurizes well every single seat in the cabin has an oxygen mask above it and as soon as the cabin goes past 14 000 feet these masks will drop down you get the mask you give it a pull and pulling it activates an oxygen generator it's a little chemical block that sits above your seat and as it slowly Burns it gives off pure oxygen and you put your mask on and it will give you a positive flow of oxygen for up to 22 minutes in the flight deck we will have our oxygen masks on they're a dedicated Supply we have oxygen tanks for us and we will be starting what's called an emergency descent and we will descend the aircraft very quickly from 35 000 feet we need to get down to 10 000 feet in an emergency descent we can do that in around four minutes so you're not going to run out of oxygen around Europe there's the highest bit of ground we have is Mount Blanc near Geneva you can be past that in four minutes if you're up at Heights another one I get asked is can the aircraft land on water if we have an emergency addiction well it's been proved it can Sully did it in the Hudson with an Airbus there was one many years ago in Africa with a 767 that have been hijacked and ran out of fuel because the hijackers wouldn't let them land if we have this scenario where we're looking like we may have to land on water we've already extinguished every single option we've run through every checklist we've tried every diversion we've tried to get engines going there's different checklist if you have dual engine failure after takeoff or if you have it at height we have tried everything before we do that and I've got to say it's incredibly incredibly rare it happens but as we saw in the Hudson it is possible and it is completely survivable every single person walked away so in conclusion you are incredibly incredibly safe in an aircraft your odds of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11 million your odds have died in a car crash one five thousand the most dangerous part of your day will be driving to that airport flying is much safer than driving right thanks for watching if you found this video helpful don't forget to hit the like And subscribe button and if you've overcome a fear of flying yourself feel free to let us know in the comments don't forget to check out the playlist in the description for more pilot explains videos and subscribe to the channel we'll see you on the next one [Applause] [Music] thank you

Channel: Airliners Live

Views: 682,684

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Id: 5jvObr-KnHY

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022