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. Now I can't thank all of
you in the 74 crew enough for continuing to
send me these videos. You guys have scoured the
Internet and continue to send these in. I can't thank you
enough for that. I appreciate all
of you very much. If you have a video that you
think would be good for this series, the two easiest places
to send them to me is the free forum, 74gear.com or my Instagram. Let's get into it. Something that all of you don't know
is that the guy who edits theses videos, Mike, is about to
head off to flight school. And one of the first pieces
of advice that I got given when I went out
to start flight school was from a guy who
had like 2000 hours. which at the time I had
maybe like three hours. So it sounded like
he had 1 million hours. But one of the things
that he told me about was, Hey, in the event that
you have an engine failure, here's some tips of what to do and here's what not to do. So hopefully, Mike
as he edits this video, will take my advice as he
goes through flight school. And hopefully he doesn't have
this problem of an engine failure, which is what I
think happened here. But if he does that
he follows this advice so that way he can continue to
edit these videos for all of you. And right here, it sounds like
right when the engine started to fail. Now instinctively as a pilot, what you want to do in the case
of an emergency is land, right? You're going to want to land and your
want to land at the safest possible place. And most people will think, well, I want to get on a runway. That thing is built for airplane so
that's where I want to put my airplane. That's all that I
know how to land on. So that's where
I want to get to. The problem is is in doing that in making that effort to
get back to the runway, sometimes you put yourself
in a more dangerous situation than if you landed off field. Now I should clarify, this applies to a single engine
which is what I believe this is. A single engine aircraft. If you're on a commercial
aircraft and you lose an engine, the pilots have
done a ton of training. I do training on that at least
once a year in the simulator, not in an actual plane, but we do the training for that in
your typical commercial aircraft. We can easily handle in
having an engine failure, even before takeoff and can still get
up in the air, fly back around and land. so that doesn't apply
for a commercial aircraft. But if you're on a plane with only
one engine and you lose that engine, well, you're kind of
limited on your options. The other thing that I
want to point out here is it looks like they're drifting
from the center of the runway, which is a terrible
habit to be in. But I used to do it in
flight school as well. But look how far left
of the runway they are from where they started at
the beginning of this video. The reason why that's important
is because that if in the event that you lose an engine
at, let's say 20 feet, on a small plane like this, usually you can drift right back down and
you're right in the middle of the runway. You don't need to bank your plane
over to get towards the runway. You can just drift down
and settle down and roll off. And even if you roll off the end
of the runway at 10 or 20 knots, you're going to be a lot better off than
if you go down into the grass at 80 knots. So from this point here, he'd have to make an aggressive
bank back to the runway assuming there was
more runway to land on. Now, I've actually seen
a pilot do this in real life. I was already a
commercial pilot at the time. I was doing charters and a guy, we were on a long runway.
It was a really long runway. I saw him take off and then
get about 10 or 15 feet in the air and then they landed. And then they taxied back in. I don't know what was wrong, but because he was
right in the middle runway, it was not really a big deal. He was able to just land
right back down in the runway and control or the
tower was saying like, are you okay? Is
everything all right? Now, at the end of the day, he got cleared for takeoff and
he didn't get cleared for landing, but it's better to land if he
had some type of a problem, which is what I'm
guessing happened. And he was able to
taxi off the runway. But if you're far far to the left
and now you're having to bank, that is a problem. The thing is is when
you bank your aircraft, you lose a lot of altitude because
your wings aren't lifting you up. And the easiest
way to explain this. And I've explained it many
times is when you're driving a car and you put your hand out
the window, because as a kid, I always used to do that. But if you put your hand out
the window like this and it's level and you have it
slightly pitched up, what happens? The wind is pushing
underneath your hand and it's wanting to push
your hand up in the air. But if you have your
hand at an angle like this, it's not really wanting to push
your hand up as much as wanting to push it to the side, right? So if you have your
plane bank like this, the wind that's coming at
your plane isn't pushing you up. It's pushing you to the side and it's no longer helping your
plane get away from the ground. So by banking, you start to lose the
lift of your aircraft. And which means you're going to
have to descend to keep the speed going, because the propeller's
no longer working. So by doing a very
aggressive bank, you lose altitude very quickly which
is not what you want to be doing. Something to listen to
when you're a passenger is if you're in a really
long banking turn, sometimes you'll
hear the engines rev up and they do that
because the plane is going to need to be
continuing to go faster in order to hold that angle because the wings aren't
generating the same amount of lift. So it needs to add more speed
in order to hold that altitude there. So next time you're in a
really long banking turn, listen for those engines
to rev up a little bit and that's why that's happening. Now it's my guess that
the engine starts to go here. And the pilot initially
starts to turn left. My guess is and this is strictly as a guess
because I saw the other plane turning to the right. My guess is is that the
procedures that this airport is, once you get a couple hundred feet
off the ground that you would turn left, the plane that looked like it
was on the right hand runway was turning to the right. So my guess is that that's
the normal procedure, which automatically is going
to be your muscle memory. If that's what
you've been doing is climbing up and turning left that's going to be
your obvious choice. To turn left because that's
what you're supposed to do. But as you look to the left, you realize there's
nowhere for this pilot to go. This is really one of the worst
case scenarios that you can have in a small single
engine aircraft. Is be just taking off
because you have no speed, no momentum and no altitude. So you don't have really
a lot of things to trade. You're low to the ground.
You don't have a lot of speed. And so there's really
not much you can do. So let's look at the
options that they have here. The left over here
does not look very good. Straight ahead is okay. But the pilot looks at and
sees this field to the right and makes a decision to commit as
that is the safest place they feel to go. There's two things that the
pilot did here that I really liked. And the first one was
making a decision quickly. They didn't have a lot of choice
because they were low to the ground. So they looked around, they found those
were their options left, straight ahead
or to the right. And they chose pretty quickly, Hey, let's go to the right. Now, they could
have landed straight. There was something
options to land straight, but they made their decision. And I can't fault anybody for making a
decision and didn't acting on it quickly, which was the second
thing that they did very well. They made the decision, okay, let's go here. And they committed to it. They didn't change or guess, or it doesn't look like based
off of what was going on. The plane just aimed
straight for that field there and headed
straight towards that. Now, if you make a decision
and you make the wrong decision, you can learn from that. But something in aviation
and a lot of things in life is hesitating to make any decision
at all, you can't learn from that. And that will get you in a lot more
trouble than making a bad decision. This is actually another
view that's looking at the wing and you can see how
much the wing goes down. Now, initially they go to the left
and then when he turns to the right, you can see how much altitude
they continue to lose here. Now, of course, this is
something easy for you to analyze or for me to analyze because
we're not in the situation. Now, if you have this situation, you're going to get a massive surge
of adrenaline, as you can imagine. And so you're going to be
more aggressive on the controls than if you're in a
simulated engine failure. You're not at risk
of losing your life. But I think if the pilot had taken
a shallower turn to the right, they would've actually made
it up to this flat grass area here and had a much better landing. Of course the other alternative would
to be to contact air traffic control, say unable a few times
and then say something like we're going to end
up in the Hudson. But since we don't have the air
traffic control audio for this video, we don't know
what he really said. Jokes aside, you can
see from this angle here, they actually safely
made it on the land. The plane stayed
more or less intact. It was clearly damaged, but
hopefully the pilot was okay. These are really split second
decisions that a pilot has to make. And unfortunately, when you're newer and you're flying
a small single engine aircraft like this, you don't have a lot of options. You're low to the
ground. You're slow. And you're only got a couple
hundred feet and a couple seconds to make a decision of
where you want to land. What that pilot told me
that I will never forget is if you lose your engine low to
the ground, just land straight ahead. It doesn't really matter
what's in front of you. You're better off
to just land straight. Because he watched a guy, he was sitting
out on the runway. He watched this guy take off. He heard the engine
spool up so he looked up and when he looked up, he saw this guy trying to
make a really steep turn, to get back to the runway. By making that really steep
turn, remember I told you about, if you bank too much,
the wings start to lose lift. Well, he banked so much. The wings lost all their
lift and he basically just came straight out of the sky and pancaked into the ground. Now had he landed forward? Even if he was in a busy area because
I think it was in like the LA area. He's going to be landed forward on
a road or hit some trees or whatever, or a golf course like
Harrison Ford did, even if he had done
any of those things, the plane would've been totaled. That's true. But he probably would've lived. By trying to get back to the runway,
he actually ended up killing himself. So keep in mind
when you're out there, you kind of have to play these scenarios
out, even though they're kind of dark, but play this scenario out. You lose your engine
here. What would you do? And if it's straight ahead, you have to realize that that's
a sacrifice you have to make. If you're only a couple
hundred feet off the ground and you try to turn your plane
really aggressively like that, the chances are
you making it back. It's not going to work. You have a taxi way
or something like that, that you can land on, great. or land straight ahead and roll off the end of
the runway at 20 knots. That's not a big deal. At the end of the day, this pilot did a really great
job. I think that they were okay. The plane was probably
totaled, but that's fine. You can get a new plane. It's hard to get a new you. And as you watch the
plane hit the ground, realize how slow
they're actually going. It's kind of like being
in a bad car crash, which people
survive all the time. In one of these worst
case scenarios here, I think the pilot
did a great job. The person who sent me this, sent it and asked was this like a life
threatening thing. The pilots just took off into a
storm like in the movie Flight. And the thing you have to realize is that
air traffic control and the tower there before they cleared
you for takeoff, they can see the weather
outside their windows and they have a radar to see what's going on around them. So they can see what's
going on out there. And they're not going to just
fire a plane off into the sky, into the middle
of a terrible storm. But the other thing that's more
important than air traffic control is that we, as pilots, have
a radar in front of us. In a really stormy day, we'll have this radar up and
we'll line up on the runway and we'll look at this radar. This radar shows us the level
of water that's in the clouds. So we really know if
it's safe or not to take off. Now, if you as a pilot,
line up on the runway and you look at your
radar and it looks bad, even if air traffic control
clears you for takeoff, you don't have to go. You can look out there and go, Hey, we see a massive
cell in front of us. We don't want to
go and I've done that. And I've heard
other pilots do that. Now, even if air traffic
control is annoyed by that, it doesn't really matter. They're sitting in their tower or on
the ground and you're about to take off. So if you don't think it looks
good, you're not going to go. And that's what I want you
as a passenger to realize if the pilots are
taking off here, they know what they're getting
into and they're making a decision. Hey, I feel good about
going, let's go ahead and go. But there's something that you
may not have noticed in this video and that's this
thing right here. Typically you'll
never see this up unless the plane is
trying to slow down or the wings are usually trying to get rid
of lift, which happens during landing. And that's exactly
what was happening. That pilot had the controls and
trying to get that left wing to lose lift. If you had looked
at the other wing, it would've looked
more like this. Now this is obviously
the same wing, but this is what that other
wing would've looked like. My guess is that the wind was
coming from the left hand side, which mean the left wing
was getting a lot more lift. By the pilot
putting in controls, what he's doing is he's
put the controls in to say, Hey, left wing. I don't want as much
lift as you're giving me. So I have the controls in here to
help it reduce the amount of lift. So it matches the same
amount of lift on the right wing. Because when you take
off, just like when you land, you want to have your
wings level with the ground. It seems that the pilot maybe had
too much of a control input in here because you'll notice as they
actually come off the ground that left wing starts to
go towards the ground. And then they're fighting
to keep the wings level as they climb away
from the ground. If you put too much control in, what will happen is
as the plane takes off, you're telling that left wing, I want less lift out of you. And now your right wing
is getting a lot more lift. So you take off
and what happens? Your left wing loses lift and
it goes towards the ground and your right wing goes up. Now you have another problem. So what you'll have to
do is put in enough control that the left wing isn't getting
any more lift than the right wing. And then as you plane speeds up, sometimes you have to filter or
change the amount of control or input that you're putting in there because
this plane starts to speed up. It's going to react
a little bit differently. How much control do
you need to put in there? As my flight instructor said, which I hated all the time when I asked him how much
rudder do I need to have in when I do a crosswind landing, he would say, oh, just enough. I hated that answer. I
needed the exact number, but that's really
the right answer. Just enough. And that's what
you have to do here. I recently was taking off and
this pilot had more control input into the wing that I
thought was good. She had the
control and I thought, man, that seems like
an aggressive amount, even though it was a really
windy landing or a takeoff, I thought that seems
like maybe too much. And I knew that the wing was actually
doing exactly what you see here. And I thought, Hmm, well, let's
see what happens. I was sitting in the third seat. So for me, I was watching her
do this. And I thought, you know, it doesn't
look aggressive. And I'm looking at the instrument
display to see that the wings are levels as we are going down
the runway. So I thought, okay, well it seems like nothing
worth really saying at this point. And we took off and, and we climbed out
and the wings were level eventually to
kind of rolled it out and it worked fine. But if you have the controls
in a lot, you'll see that go up. Now you should only
see that on a windy day. If you're seeing that
on a very calm day, then the pilot's doing
something weird up there. Now this is a funny one
because at first I thought, oh, it looks like
it's a windy day. But luckily the videographer
got the wind sock right here. And in the video, we can see that the winds
were actually pretty light in coming from
the left hand side. Now I think one of
my worst landings ever, and I still remember to this
day was at the regionals. I went into Newark and I like... it was a spine crusher. I mean, I pounded that landing
in, it was very swirly winds. I was fighting the plane
all the way to the ground. I pulled the power
out probably too soon. Didn't flare. I did all the things wrong
and I pounded that in, I mean, embarrassingly pounded that in. And it was a one day trip. I was relatively new, maybe
three months at the regionals. I pounded it in and there
was I think, four legs. So the captain had two
legs and I had two legs. That was my first leg with him. And all I was thinking about
on his leg and my next leg is I need to redeem myself so
this guy doesn't go home thinking, how did this guy even get here? But luckily pilots have
excuses for everything. And so we say, I don't focus this hard
on a really calm day. So that's usually when
my landings are my worst. So we have an
excuse for everything. So let's see what this
pilot's excuse is for flying and having this bad
landing on a calm day. So it looks like the
pilots actually cheating a little bit upwind
at the start here. And all that means is that
what the pilots are doing is actually cheating a
little bit to the left side, which is where the
wind is coming from. They're cheating a
little bit to the left side. So as they come in
and actually touch down, the plane actually gets pushed
into the middle of the runway. Now you can do that
on smaller planes. You can't really do
that on a larger aircraft. I mean you, you could,
but it's not typically normal, but you can do that
on a smaller plane. You just cheat a little bit. And that way, if the plane
does go down and land a little bit left to the
runway, it's not a big deal. As your plane gets bigger,
your tires get obviously wider. And as they get wider,
if you're too far left, you're going to be eating up
the runway lights over there, which your chief pilot is
not going to be happy about. Now, you see they're a
little bit to the left here. And as they get towards the ground,
the wind starts pushing them to the right, which I guess is part
of their original plan. But at a certain
point, the pilot realizes we're going too
far to the right. And so he puts
the left wing down. And when that left wing goes down to
get them back to the middle of the runway, their left tire hits the ground. If there's one habit
that I wish I knew back when I was going
through flight school and knew that I'd
end up flying a 747, which never my wildest dreams
that I imagined would happen. But if I knew that
that was coming, as soon as I got good landing, the way they got it
taught in flight school, which is almost
exactly like this. Land with your
wing into the wind and your left tire would land first,
then your right tire, then your nose. That's the way I got taught. If I knew though, on bigger planes
that you had to land with your mains and your wings
level to the ground, what I would've done is
as I got comfortable landing, the way that I got taught. So that way I could get the plane on the
runway, regardless of how windy it was, I would've started doing
things like landing level. So that way I didn't have any problems
as I got later on in bigger planes. And I didn't really
have any issues, but I did have a few bumpy
landings at the very beginning because I was making that correction
of trying to land with a little bit of my wing into the wind. The problem here is that if
you do this type of landing that this pilot does, in a large aircraft it's going to
make everybody on the flight deck very uncomfortable. You see that when the
plane starts to go left, the momentum carries it to the left
because the bank was so aggressive, which means now they're going to
have to bring the right wing down. And then the right tire touches. Now the plane kept down
the middle of the runway and really at the
end of the day, there was nothing that was unsafe
about the way that this got done. It just would've been not ideal to
be having a bunch of left movement and a bunch of right movement
really close to the ground like that. If you're doing that
on a larger aircraft, it's going to be
a bigger problem. There's a video that I have of an
A380 doing something very similar to that because the
momentum is a lot more. It looks more aggressive. If you want to see an A380 having
almost the same type of landing, check out this video here. And if you want to see some pilots
getting along with air traffic control, kind of, check out this video up here. I look forward to
hearing from you. Until then, keep the blue side up.
