WHY did They DO THIS!? | RedBull Plane Swap stunt

[Music] under normal circumstances a stunt like the pilot swap stunt that red bull sponsored last week would have created quite a lot of discussions within aviation circles but the fact that it happened so close to the emergency revocation of trevor jacobs license for his terrible faked crash makes this even more awkward now i want to make it absolutely clear here that i do not consider these two to be the same however the principle of with great reach comes great responsibility definitely applies here because red bull has far more reach than any trevor jacob could ever hope to have and i'm going to explain why that is a problem here [Music] last week red bull sponsored a stunt where two pilots luke aikens and andy farrington were supposed to combine their skills in skydiving with some quite unorthodox piloting the idea was that they were going to take off with two modified cessna 182s they would climb in close formation up to 14 000 feet and once up there they would put the aircraft into vertical dive pull the mixture shut down the engines extend a type of speed break and then they would jump out of their aircraft skydive over and get into each other's aircraft and then land making it so that they would take off in one aircraft and land in another there were no other people inside of these aircraft which meant that it would leave these aircraft completely without a pilot in a vertical dive for approximately 50 seconds to a minute now there were some technical issues with this and probably the biggest one being that if you put a cessna 182 into a vertical dive or any aircraft for that matter it will very quickly accelerate and it will go faster than any skydiver can ever hope to go in fact it will probably go faster than it is designed to go itself so it might break up before it hits the ground in order to counteract that these two aircraft had been heavily modified the first thing that had been done was that both aircraft had been fitted with these ginormous speed brakes speed brakes were fitted to the landing gear fittings which are some of the strongest points on the aircraft and when extended these speed brakes would multiply the amount of drag that these aircrafts exerted they were also fitted with these giant tires that would increase the drag and with constant speed propellers so that when they were in the vertical dive the propellers would be wind milling and the fact that they were wind milling also increases the drag with all of these modifications working properly it would make these aircraft slow enough during the vertical dive for this stunt to be possible but the high speed was not the only problem that the stun team needed to overcome they also had a problem with how to maintain these two aircraft in a close to vertical dive because an aircraft is actually built with something called positive pitch stability this means that if an aircraft finds itself in a vertical dive it will want to try to get back into a wings level or close the wings level position so as the speed builds up the nose will automatically come up and of course that was not allowed to happen here so the team fitted these aircraft with a modified type of autopilot that would maintain the pitch down throughout this stunt in total the red bull team made more than 100 different test flights checking out all of these modifications including the autopilot they even did a pilot swap flight but with a safety pilot in each aircraft on the actual day of the stunt everything initially worked out beautifully with both of the aircraft climbing out in very close formation climbing up to 14 000 feet and then they went into the vertical dive still in formation but here is where things started to go wrong because as they were getting out of the cockpit one of the pilots luke akins jumps out and you can clearly see that when he leaves the aircraft the aircraft kind of tumbles over slightly and then it slowly starts to rotate and goes into an inverted flat spin the problem with that is that an aircraft that is in an inverted flat spin actually descends much slower than it would be if it was in a vertical dive which is what they were calculating on so this means that luke farrington the other pilot was supposed to get into this aircraft now finds himself below this aircraft which is spinning and that would make it very very dangerous for him to try to get back into the aircraft so instead he kind of flies out and activates his parachute and lands safely hey hold on one minute before we go too deep into the video i just want to thank today's sponsor which is nordvpn i was traveling recently together with my family and i needed to get into contact with my workmates via skype but i found out that skype wasn't working in the country i was traveling to but with nordvpn i was able to change my ip address to sweden instead and voila skype worked perfectly at an amazing internet speed nor vpn allows you to change your virtual location by using 5400 servers in 60 different countries and it just takes one click i also use nordvpn to enjoy my favorite entertainment content securely and you can use up to six different devices on any given deal now they've added another layer of security called the threat protection it will protect your browsing even when you're not connected to a vpn server which is really cool if this sounds interesting and you want to start protecting yourself and your data today well then click on the link in the video description here below which will give you an exclusive 62 of your nordvpn deal and it's completely risk-free because of the 30-day money-back guarantee thank you very much nordvpn now back to the video luke akins manages to get into his aircraft and gets it under control restarts the engines and then lands the aircraft without further incident the other aircraft that was now in a flat spin had been modified to have a parachuting system in it not like the ballistic recovery shoot systems that you see on some modern aircraft this is a much more simple system and it was designed to activate if it got too close to the ground to high speed or it could be remotely activated as well unfortunately it seems like that shoot system either malfunctioned slightly or it just wasn't big enough because the cessna was smashed to absolute oblivion now we don't know exactly what caused this aircraft to go into this inverted flat spin there had been many many test flights like i said before but it's also a fact that this giant air brake was slightly off the center of gravity and there is a possibility that when luke aikens jumped out of his aircraft it just shifted the center of gravity enough to destabilize the aircraft and push it into this flat spin now the red bull team had made a lot of different simulations and a lot of different test flights with this but it's like the pilots actually alluded to in a post-stunt interview that you never really know how this aircraft is going to react until you do it for real so who are these two pilots that actually did this stunt down because obviously red bull they're only the sponsors here well it turns out that both luke and andy are very experienced skydivers they have more than 20 000 jumps each to the name and they're also commercial pilot certificate holders which might become a problem which we'll get to in a second luke akins is the owner of paratactics llc which is the company that owns both of the cessnas and also the company that made the petition to the faa in order to get the permission to do this stunt in the first case now luke is no stranger to stunt like this back in 2016 he actually jumped out of an aircraft at 25 000 feet without the parachute and landed on a net that was set up making him the person that had made the highest intentional drop phone aircraft and survived without a parachute that stunt was not sponsored by red bull but he had been working together with red bull before as a consultant on the red bull stratus project remember the one where felix baumgartner went up into a capsule up to 127 851 feet i think and then jumped out and managed during freefall to reach a speed of mach 1.25 which is crazy so he had been working together with red bull before but now we're getting to the actual crux of the problem here and that is the fact that just short of 60 days prior to this stunt taking place luke akins sent in a request to the faa in order to get permission to do this stunt in the first place the problem they were facing was that in order for them to do this stunt they needed to break against an faa rule specifically paragraph 91.105 out of section 14 in the force and what that rule is saying in plain english is that a pilot of a single pilot aircraft needs to be seated by the controls with its seat belt fastened for the entirety of the flight so luke now needed to make a really good case of the faa why these two pilots needed to get an exemption from this rule so that they could leave their piloting positions and jump over to another aircraft and then go down the land in order to do so both the red bull team and luke akins had presented what they thought was a very strong case first of all they had extraordinary safety precautions in place there would be no in-person spectators they would be parachutes fitted to each of the aircraft these parachutes would be able to be both remotely activated if needed but they would also be activated automatically if something were to happen there would be an on-site crash team and also there would be people in the area that would be visually verifying that there was no other aircraft in the airspace when the stunt were to happen now to start with the faa had some problems with the last point that was mentioned there specifically the fact that there needs to be a pilot inside each aircraft in order to see and avoid any other aircraft at any given time but on top of this the faa also wanted to know why this would be in the public interest in the first place to that luke akins answered that they wanted to forward the interest of aviation in general specifically in the areas of stem science technology engineering and maths now the faa wasn't convinced by this so they asked him to please explain this a little bit further send in some more reasons to why this would be accepted and the answer that they got back was basically we have promised a lot of media outlets and sponsors that we're going to do this event now that did not impress the fda so the faa rejected the application said that no you're not supposed to do this and as a reason for it they stated that a this went against previous decisions that are taken on a similar event that happened back in 2012 where an application had been sent in to crash land a boeing 727 in the desert in order to try to find out which seats were the safest in an aircraft you might remember that this actually went ahead anyway but that was because the people who did this experiment then went down to mexico and the mexican authorities gave them permission to do this check anyway but also the faa stated that what you're stating about what we can learn when it comes to stem here science technology engineering and math can still be done within the letters of the law namely you can do a swap anyway using all of the systems that you've built up but with a safety pilot making sure that there's still a pilot inside of the aircraft that was not what luke or his sponsors wanted to hear they wanted to do a proper pilot swap so they just went ahead and did it anyway against the specific instruction of the faa and here is the problem because now we have a crashed cessna 182 we have two commercial pilot license holders that have done something that they had written that they were not allowed to do so we can probably expect that the faa is going to come down on them pretty hard so what do i think about this then well first of all i want to say that there are some similarities between what happened here and what happened with trevor jacob but there's also some big differences and one of the main differences is that these guys they actually had a plan an organization a way to deal with this it is very likely that if they would have just continued and not done this stunt but continued to have a dialogue with the faa sending in the paperworks that were requested and answering the questions to a satisfactory degree they might have eventually gotten the permission to do this and they could have continued with it or they could have done what the boeing 727 guys did which was go down to mexico or somewhere else and ask for permission there and eventually get it and then do the stunt and it could have been a very very cool stunt i'm not against stunts like this as a principle it can raise the awareness of aviation it can raise the interest in the business it might make more people want to to explore what aviation is all about which is something that i'm for but you cannot do it against the specific instructions of your regulator there are some businesses where asking for forgiveness is better than asking for permission but aviation is not that business and i'm also willing to almost bet that any business where you ask for permission don't get it and you do it anyway you are very unlikely to get forgiveness afterwards almost all rules and regulation in aviation are written in blood in one way or another we have gotten so far and become so safe because of very hard earned experiences that earlier aviators have taught us and that is why i take offense when i see someone purposefully break the rules like this because it sets a very very bad example now check out this video next it's really interesting and if you want to support the work that i do here on the channel then consider becoming part of my lovely patreon family or you can always get yourself some merch have an absolutely fantastic day and i'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Mentour Now!

Views: 145,958

Keywords: redbull, stunt, cessna, mentor pilot, mentour pilot, 182, cessna 182, redbull plane swap, red bull stunt, plane crash, red bull

Id: A8gz8eXJMeE

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022