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.
