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 appreciate all of you in the 74 crew
for sending me these different videos to keep this series going. If you have a video that you
want to see in Viral Debrief, the two easiest
places to send to me: My Instagram or the
free forum 74gear.com Let's get into it! Well, that probably
didn't go as planned. So there's obviously
something I want to talk about. They had the tail strike there. But there's something that they do here
that I see pilots do from time to time and they shouldn't be doing
it in these types of planes and that's
"Aerodynamic braking". They're leaving the nose
up of the plane in order to use the wings to help
slow the plane down. Flight school owners are probably going
to be upset that I'm talking about this but it's really not a useful skill
unless you're flying a fighter jet or you're using a small plane at a flight
school and trying to save the brakes. It's the skill that you
learn in flight school. We get taught at in flight school
on how to use aerodynamic braking using those wings to help alleviate
the stress that is on the brakes. You learn that there
in your first year flight school and then you
don't use it for the next 40 some years of your career. It's just not a good habit
to get in and here's why. This plane doesn't look
like it has thrust reversers and that's when the
engines open up here and make that loud
rumble when you land. The pilot has the nose of the
aircraft up here while slowing down. And he has these
things deployed up here. But if one goes up and
the other one does not, the plane is going to
want to pull to one side. The same applies
with thrust reversers. And as your aircraft slows down,
the rudder becomes less effective. So then the only way to steer is
with your nose wheel on the ground. That's how you steer
on slower speeds. So if you have the nose up and then you
start to get pushed off into the grass, you have no way to steer as you're slowing
down unless you slam the nose down. So really the only reason that you're
going to, in a commercial jet of course, keep your nose up
like that is to look cool. Have I done that on
any of my aircraft? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But it's definitely not a habit you
want to get into for that exact reason. If your thrust reversers one
side goes and the other doesn't or if you any of your speed brakes
or any of those types of things, if part of it deploys
and part of it doesn't and you're too aggressive
and you've got your nose up, it may take a second before
you realize what's happening and now you're
shooting off in the grass. Have to dump the
nose over really hard so now you're slamming
the nose on the ground and then having to give an
input in order to get the nose to do what you want to
stay on the runway. There's no benefit in a commercial jet
to keep your nose off the ground like that unless you're trying
to look cool and that's fine until you
shoot off in the grass which always gives you a
one-way flight to see the Chief Pilot. So besides doing the wheelie here
and risking putting everyone in the grass, it appears they flared late and
drove the gear into the ground. And over flared. So combining all those things, it
looks like they have a tail strike here and then risked another one
as they moved along here keeping the nose
up off the ground. Now, I've never flown
this aircraft so I can't tell you what the flare
is supposed to look like. On some aircraft,
it's better to actually have almost what
looks like a flat landing. I don't know about this aircraft
but I can definitely assure you you're never supposed to flare so much
to have the tail strike or almost strike which is what happened here. For those of you in flight
school, I realized that landing and doing aerodynamic braking is
something you're going to have to learn and it's something your flight school
owners are going to want you to do. It's just not something you
want to keep as a muscle memory once you get into a
commercial aircraft because it's not what
it's designed to do. You're going to want to get
the nose wheel on the ground safely and without
slamming it over. You're going to want to
get the nose on the ground because as you start to slow down,
that's how you're going to have to steer. Your rudder is going to have
almost no impact after a certain speed. It's a really cool shot. Back. Nothing like off-roading your
airline's aircraft to get a nickname. You never, in aviation unless you're
a fighter pilot, wanna have a nickname This is a really good way to get known in
your airline and not for the right reason. So at this point, the pilot is basically
lined up down the middle of the runway. Maybe slightly to the right
but still in the middle overall. If you have to be on one side though, it's
better to be cheating on the upwind side. So the wind will blow you into the
middle of the runway once you touch down. But then you see
the pilot make a bit of an aggressive move
to the upwind side here. Now, we're not
going to talk about the aircraft floating or
landing long here's why: With the winds really
high, this is a small aircraft, you could land really
far down the runway. And with the wind strong, sometimes
you want to keep a little bit of power in. Forget about how far he landed. Let's just talk about the crosswind
and and what happened in that crab before they shot
off in the grass. Now, these pilots were fighting
to get this plane onto the ground and that's just part of flying
a smaller aircraft like this. If you guys remember some of
my past stories I talked about PJ, he was a Vietnam era B-52 pilot that I flew small aircraft
with down in South Texas. In South Texas, you get
all kinds of stormy winds and all kinds of crazy
stuff happens down there. I've flown into when
hurricanes were coming. All kinds of crazy winds
swirling, all kinds of different stuff. And so in a lot of
those aircraft, you are just fighting with power
and with your controls to get it and keep it
lined up down the runway. So I know what it feels
like to be in their situation. You notice here the pilot
has now leveled off the plane and has pushed the rudder
down to straighten the plane out. Now, this is a bit high to do this because
they are to the left of the runway. And if they just stayed like
this, the wind will push them right into the middle
of the runway. But you see, they let some of the
rudder out because the nose is now
pointing at the wind again. Instead of going
straight down the runway. Now, this is something
that I actually did as well. I would make a rudder correction
to straighten the plane out and then once it's straightened out,
I would take my foot off the rudder. I don't know why I
would do that like: "I've made that correction
and now I take it out". That's not how it works with
the rudder on any aircraft. The only plane that you
can make a small correction and then not make any
more corrections is an Airbus. You can make a little correction and then
the plane will now fly that correction. That doesn't work like
that on any other plane. And I used to do it and
that's what it looks like here. It looks like they pushed the
rudder in to straighten it out and then let the rudder out and then it
went right back to facing into the wind. I've done it before. I've just
never gone into the grass. I know that it seems weird
because I've talked about this before but as your plane gets bigger,
a lot of times it gets easier to fly. I know that's not really
fair but life's not fair. The pilot lands here and he side
loads the landing gear of the plane which isn't great but
obviously not terrible. It's just hard on the aircraft and
uncomfortable for the passengers. But this is where having good
muscle memory is very important. The pilot needed to
keep his foot on the rudder and keep the plane
going down the runway. And keep the
aileron into the wind. The aileron is here on the wing. That is what you use to
steer the plane left and right. But as soon as he landed,
he needed to turn this wing so it didn't get
lifted up by the wind which you see it happens here. As soon as all the wheels were down, it
looks like the pilot let go all the inputs for the rudder and the controls. Now, all these things that I'm
explaining to you I know them because I've messed them
up in some form or the other. Like I talked about earlier, I've stepped
on the rudder and let the rudder out. I forgot to put the aileron
in and had the wing lift up. I've just never had anything go
so bad that I wasn't able to correctly get it fixed before
it got out of control. On a 747, I've talked
about in a crosswind landing, if you don't put
the aileron correction in that wing will lift up and you
can slap one of the engines from the other side
down on the ground. These are very expensive engines so
it's just good to get that muscle memory and sometimes you got to
learn from bad experience and messing things up which I've done
pretty much everything that that guy did. Except for shoot
off in the grass. I've never done that. The easiest thing
that I attribute this to is where the pilot feels the
aircraft is on the ground and they mentally
celebrate and they go: "Okay, I've completed what I needed
to do of get this plane on the ground". But something that most guys
learn around 14 or 15 or maybe 16, nobody wins when you
prematurely celebrate. Just remember that. The reason this plane is still
shooting towards the grass here is the weather veining. The wind is hitting
the tail of the plane which is pushing it to go off to the
side of the runway towards the wind. You have to counteract
that by using the rudder to change the direction and get the
nose wheel to steer you down the runway. That's why it's important to have the
nose wheel on the ground very quickly. Had the pilot right here
pushed on the rudder? He could have kept
it on the runway. But instead, they weren't aggressive
enough and they let it get into the grass. I don't know if they switched
controls or what happened but then it took them a long time
to finally get back on the runway. I'm not sure why
it took so long. I'm not sure if they were
going around or something. It doesn't really matter. Now, I've never done this before
where I've gone off the runway. But I'm guessing that once you get
back onto the runway and then stop, you look at each
other and think: "Man, I hope that *** Kelsey
doesn't post this on Viral Debrief!" Dude, I remember
seeing this on the news. It's just crazy when
you think about it. This is in JFK and I used to fly to JFK all
the time, in Detroit all the time and see these Delta 747s
there and I used to think: "Man, those are so cool! I
wish one day I could fly those!". And I honestly never thought
that something would ever happen. That someone would make the mistake
of letting me fly them but here I am. So the first thing to notice here
is this guy right here running. You see how far
he's running away? That's because from the
flight deck, we're so far up. You have to be very far away
for us to be able to see you. These are marshallers so we're
looking at them for indications of what we are
supposed to be doing. Those marshallers have all
kinds of different hand signals. Starting your engine, setting
your brakes, releasing your brakes and they have all these different symbols
but the one that they tell you to stop and not move anymore
is when they make an X. They'll cross their two
wands and there will be an X. That X says: "Don't move". So those different
signs that they make, that's what we're looking at when
we're deciding what we're going to do until they hook
up an audio jack. So with all those different signs
we're expecting to make things. Now this footage is
obviously really grainy so I can't see exactly what
he's doing with his hands. He's saying set
the brakes or what. But in this scenario if he didn't
want them to continue to move, what he would normally do and
what I see always that people do is they just hold the X. They hold the X with
their wands or their hands or something to let
us know not to move. You would never have someone
make a symbol and say stop. And then walk away and then typically you're not, as
a pilot going, to then move forward knowing that there's
a tug that's under there or there's people
that's under there. You're not going to be
moving forward typically. I don't know what happened
here as far as the signals but I didn't see him waving. They make this sign like this which is continue
to move forward. He started just walking away. So I'm not sure why the pilots
decided to then move forward knowing that there's
people all around there. So usually what
you'd want to do there is flash your lights, wait for
someone to plug up an audio jack or get in front of
you or something. And then they're
going to tell you: "Yes, you can move forward or shut down
here. Well, they're going to tow you in" or whatever the situation is. But clearly when that guy
walked away, that was his mistake and then the pilots made a
mistake moving the aircraft forward without having anyone there
signaling them to move forward. This guy should have
stood there making the X. So we, on the flight deck,
can see what's going on. But he left. And they're not at the gate yet. They should have seen the
tug go under the nose here but I don't know where
that tug came in from. They should have seen
the tug go under the nose so the pilots made a
mistake by moving forward but this guy now walks away and I don't know why the pilots
would think it's okay to move forward. That surprises me. The only time that I can imagine
moving forward without a marshaller there, is in some airports like
I want to say Sydney. I don't know, there's
a bunch of them. But they had these
digital marshaling things. Actually, I'm in Bahrain right now in the
Middle East and they have it here as well. And what it does is it tells
you to keep moving forward. It gives you how far
away you are from parking and then it tells
you to go left or right. So having something like that could
give you a reason why they move forward I don't think they
have that in JFK. Maybe they do,
but I don't think so. It looks like what was going to
happen was the tug was going to hook up and then pull
them into the gate. It's what it looks like
they were setting up to do. Which I've had that happen and
what happens when you do that is you pull in and you'll stop
and you'll shut down your engines. They're going to hook
up an audio and they're going to say: "Shut
down all your engines" "We're going to hook
up to you right now". So you won't shut down all your
engines until you know you're not moving. And you're not going to know that
you're done moving until they tell you: "Hey! You're done moving.
We're going to hook up here". So I don't know why they didn't hook up
and give that message to the flight deck because that's what
would have happened here. They would have said:
"We're going to tug you in this last, I don't know
10 feet or whatever it is". "So go ahead and shut down your engines".
And then you'll shut down your engines and then they'll hook up
your tug and they'll pull you. And that's how it would
normally go in this situation. But that guy with the X would stand out there until he sees, and the guy on
the ground that's talking to us, there's a little mic
jack where that tug is. There's a little mic
jack they plug in and that guy would
signal to the guy with the X "Hey! We're speaking
to them. You can go". Because obviously now
the pilots are talking to us or now that the pilots
are talking to them, they know: "Okay, cool" This is all coordinated. They'll shut down the engines and
now we can just go to the next stage. But clearly that
wasn't communicated so when that guy walked away
the pilots for some reason thought: "Oh, I'll just go this last 10
feet so we can go home". That's not how it worked out. This is kind of an
interesting video. First, because you have
flight students out there filming so they obviously know
what's going to happen. In most flight schools, the local
tower or the local communications are getting broadcast into
a portion of the flight school. And you have a bunch of flight students
that are just kind of hanging out there. So in something like
this where the guy would probably talking
to tower and saying: "Hey! I can't get my
landing gear to go down." "Can you talk to a mechanic?"
And they'll start coordinating all that. Once the pilots start
hearing that this is going on, they're going to get all their
pilot friends and a bunch of pilots are going to run out
and watch this and film it. And there's honestly not much
else that they can do in this scenario. So I honestly would probably
have done the same thing. But something that they did
do which I always kind of thought I would do if I was
in this situation so kudos to these pilots is, if you're in a situation where
you're going to have to land and you're not going to
be able to get the gear down is to as soon as you're assured
that you're going to make the runway and have plenty of time, you want to kill the engine. You see how the
propellers aren't moving? The reason they're not moving is
because they've killed the engine. And the reason they've
killed the engine is because if you land with the propellers
spinning, it will damage the engine. But if you were to kill the
engine before you land, it's going to
damage the propeller but the engine that's
spinning the propeller into the ground damaging
the engine further. The skin of an airplane, meaning the belly of the airplane
is really cheap and easy to repair. And the propellers
are also easy to repair. It's going to need an inspection and a few
other things but it's a lot lot cheaper than taking all the
both engines off and you're going to have
to just rip those apart and do a whole bunch of
work to put them back together. That's an expensive
very complicated thing. But just doing this, all you got to
do is fix the skin, fix the propellers and the plane's just
about ready to go. That thing could be up and
flying within a couple of days. No problem as soon as
you got those pieces fixed. So the pilots and whoever suggested that
they do this, they did the right thing. Shutting down the engines that saved the
plane from needing a lot of extra repairs and looks like you landed right
down the middle of the runway. Really good job! The unfortunate thing for this pilot
is that for the rest of their career, they're going to have an
incident on their record. It probably won't be an
accident, it will be an incident. And that's just determined by the amount
of damage and a few other factors but they're going to have that
incident on their record. The good thing is is they have the
video here to show exactly what happened. And show that under pressure, they were
able to know to shut down the engines, land down the
middle of the runway. But every job application that
they're going to have for the rest of their career, they're
going to have to explain that. This particular incident because
it's going to be on their record. But they can show
under pressure. "I was able to remain calm". And as long as you spin anything,
you can take something like this and spin it in a
really positive way. "Hey! we ran all the checklists.
We couldn't get anything done." "We coordinated with the
mechanics and they suggested that what we do is shut down
the engine before landing". "So I assured that we
had plenty of distance and we were on the
longest possible runway" "And we ran through
all those checklists and then we shut down the
engines before touchdown". "And we landed and the plane
was back flying in the 48 hours". Now if you said something like that
in an interview, they're going to be like: "Great! Yeah, you function
under pressure. No big deal". This is not something that's going
to typically be a penalty for you but it will be something that they'll have
to deal with for the rest of their career. If you want to see some pilots
fighting with Air Traffic Control who don't seem like they'd
function well under pressure, check out this video here. And if you want to see something a
bit funnier, check out this one up here. I look forward to
hearing from you. Until then, keep the blue side up.
