Worst DESCEND fears explained!

hi everybody welcome to mentor and you're not a video podcast as always I hope you're doing absolutely fantastic today under video guys why do we encounter turbulence when we transition through clouds and what are those strange and scary noises today I'll be covering the five things that makes people most nervous during the descent and approach this video is brought to you in cooperation with brilliant dot-org now if you want the truly fun and interactive way to kind of sharpen up your brain cells and do something else than just idly watching youtube I highly recommend you to use this link here below the five on the first of you who do so will get a 20% discount today and you'll feel brilliant you get daily challenges and you will get ways to you know go in try different courses there's no lots of stuff to discover so check it out right guys so fly the most relaxing most fun way to travel you're sitting there by your window seat looking out seeing the clouds pass below you seeing the almost endless horizon and you're thinking about how fun it will be when you reach your destination or it is absolutely horrendous you're listening for every single noise that is out there you'll find if you're feeling every shredder of the aircraft and you're thinking now today is going to be the time that we're going to fall down the difference between those two views of flying an aircraft can be what you know about what's going on your knowledge about the situation and that's what we're going to be concentrating on today so I've already done a video about that sinking feeling you get on takeoff I highly recommend you to check that out but today we're gonna be focusing on the feelings that you feel when the aircraft is descending and approaching the airport what are all those noises and all of those vibrations that you're feeling so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to talk about what actually initiates the descent right when you feel that all of a sudden the engines goes from that kind of equal even humming to suddenly going down to being almost quiet and the aircraft just suddenly pitches down what is that well first of all you need to know approximately when this happens so normally we be cruising between 36,000 and 40,000 feet generally speaking to get down from that altitude takes about 30 to 35 minutes to do okay in a perfect world a perfect flight would be a max thrust climb up to our cruise altitude and then an immediate idle descend down to our destination so it will be like a parabola now in most cases we have a quite lengthy Cruise section as well because we actually have to go somewhere so we have to calculate when to start the descent in order to achieve an idle descent because we want to do an idle descent it's the most economical way of doing it it is most environmentally friendly and the lowest noise way of doing it so the way we tend to calculate this is we look at our altitude we need in a 77 800 about three times our altitude in nautical miles plus one nautical mile for each 10 not to decelerate it down to 200 knots so this means that if we are flying at a cruise altitude tend to be at the Mach number there but it's gonna be an indication indicated speed of about 250 knots so if we're at 40,000 feet 250 knots we need 40 times 3 that's 120 plus 1 knot for each 10 knots down to 200 so that's another 5 miles so we need 125 miles in order to descend from a cruise altitude to our destination all right so like I said that will happen at about 35 minutes prior to 2 on landing and it's also very often preceded by the PA from the pilots because the way we do this is that when we are done briefing for the approach everything is set up and ready well then the pilot flying will take the PA mic up and they will give the PA to the passengers this is different if you're doing a long-haul flight but doing a short or medium hold flight this tends to be it so you'll hear the PA and a couple of minutes later the descent will come perfectly normal and the way that the sound goes down from you know quite loud to almost silent also normal because we tried to do an descend down to our destination right number two cloud transition so this is by for the biggest reason that people get nervous during the descent but I've been asking people about this nervous flight they always bring this up why is it that you might be descending it's perfectly still fear no turbulence whatsoever and as soon as you're entering the cloud the aircraft start shaking and you start feeling up you know either quite bad turbulence but at least a little bit of turbulence in order to understand this you need to understand how clouds are formed in the first place so if you're looking at these nice kind of fluffy white good weather clouds they're called cumulus clouds and they form when the Sun heats up an area of the ground to a point where a bubble of hot and moist air is released from the ground now that bubble would has the the moisture inside of it climbs upwards and as it climbs upward the temperature inside of the bubble decreases with something called a dry adiabatic lapse rate which is about three degrees per thousand feet so it will continue to get colder and colder and at some point the water vapor that's inside of this air bubble will reach its dew point and when it does it the water vapor will turn into droplets and that's what you see when the clouds are forming this is also why if you're looking out on a good birthday you see that all clouds are almost at exactly the same altitude the cloud base as we call it that's because all of them are kind of cooling down at the same lapse rate and when they reach the dew point which is gonna be fairly even you know you know a normal have fairly large geographical area they will form these clouds and when they do that lapse rate will go from dry adiabatic lapse rate to wet adiabatic lapse rate so instead of of cooling down with about three degrees per thousand feet it's now about one and a half degree / two thousand feet if I remember my ATPL theory correctly and that's because when the water vapor goes to droplets its releasing energy it goes from higher energy state to lower energy state and release its energy and that's the change in lapse rate and when that happens it will cause change this in conformity in the way that the air is moving so you'll have slightly different air movement inside of the clouds you will also have a little bit of different density inside of the cloud but also the fact that it's loud still is moving upwards it's also causing turbulence so this is why when you come and you descend and you get into the cloud you immediately get into this difference in lapse rate and this difference in end energy states and the actual fact that the air is moving upwards and that will cause turbulence okay so this means that whatever cloud that you come into you will feel a certain amount of turbulence right the more uniform big white clouds that covers a large area will normally be less turbulence because they're not formed by this kind of upward movement but they will still cause a little bit of turbulence okay now it's this dangerous done no okay all of these clouds will have moisture in them but we in front pilots we will have our weather radar constantly scanning as soon as we go into clouds the weather radar scanning and we're looking for it okay and what we're looking for is intense areas of turbulence in intense areas of air movement and we'll see that as a red area or an orange area on our weather radar and when we see that we just turn and stay clear of it because we don't want you know severe turbulence obviously but we also don't want to get close to something that could cause thunderstorms or anything like that so we stay clear that if we are descending straight through a cloud and you feel some turbulence it means that we're watching a weather era and there's nothing there it's just a little bit of turbulence not dangerous not for the aircraft not for you but you might see is the seatbelt sign come at all it probably comes on before we go through the clouds already and to make sure that everyone's sitting down and you're not gonna spill your hot coffee over yourself right number three changes in configuration so the first thing that you might notice when it comes to this is if we are Descent all of a sudden you start to feel a kind of high-frequency schroeder in the aircraft if you look out on the wings then you will probably see some panels that are standing up on the wings now these are called spoilers air spoilers and what we're doing at that point is we're trying to get rid of some energy at the aircraft that might be because we have calculated on a specific arrival route that gives us the amount of tract mass that we need we talked about how much track miles we need to descend but all of a sudden air traffic control comes in and tells us listen there's no traffic you can go straight for the ILS and give us a shortcut now we will have to high energy state done and the aircraft will be too high up that's the potential energy and potentially to high speed and the way that we get rid of that is we increase the speed and I will give us a bit more drag and we also use the speed break and when the speed break is being pulled up those spoilers comes up and that causes this kind of low rumbling this high frequency buffeting that you're feeling perfectly normal it's either that or air traffic control has kept us high because there's been traffic passing below us so we need to start descending rapidly in any case it is used to take down the energy state of the aircraft to get it into a position of where we can start her approach that's the first thing that I wanted to mention the second thing is probably when you start feeling that flaps or coming out now what you need to understand is that when we get closer to the airport we need to start slowing the aircraft down and the reason for that is because the wings of the aircraft they're built to fly as economically and efficiently as possible at high altitude at high speed but as we getting into land we need to get the aircraft down to speed where we can slow it down on the runway this runway is only so long okay and the way to do that is simply changing the shape and the size of the wings so we have something called high-lift devices those are the flaps that you see on the backside of the wings that are being extended and moved downwards and the slats that comes out in the front they're also something called khru Gulf or Krueger flaps on the front of the wings on the 800 but what they do is they extend the surface area of the wings and they change the cord as in the angle that the wing has in order to enable us to fly having the same amount of lift as we need to keep the aircraft flying but a much much lower speed and we need to do that at a fairly early stage so prior to 10 nautical miles that's about what 20 will 18 and a half kilometers away from the runway we will start to extend those flaps and what you will feel is once again that little kind of high-frequency Shradha and you might also feel that you are kind of moving forward like you're being decelerate 'dear seat that's the first couple of lap steps as we get closer to the runway we'll take more and more flaps and the more flaps we get the more lift the aircraft will will take out and also the more drag it would have so with last couple of flap steps down from flaps 15 to flaps 30 or 40 you will feel how the aircraft is kind of ballooning upwards this is something we practice a lot with our cadets when they start learning to fly the in the aircraft that as they take these final slaps settings the aircraft will you know essentially to climb upwards again and they need to be ready for that and counteract it with some forward push on the yoke in order to maintain the glide slope during the descent so this is what you'll feel and you can also if you're sitting over the the old wing exits or over the wheeler Bay you might hear kind of a metallic varying something like that that sound is the hydraulic motors that's driving the flaps out because the flaps are being driven out by like a sprue right it's screw that's that's kind of moving them outwards to make sure that they move at exactly the same rate so that we don't get any adverse kind of handling from it so you will hear that moving and that is you know this is these screws that that's moving the flaps outward so don't be worried the next configuration change that everyone thinks about is when we drop the gear and that will happen at about five nautical miles or informal nautical miles away from the runway so this is the last kind of three minutes of the flight and what happens is that we the gear down that would release the mechanical up lock that holds the gear in place when it does the load of the gear plus hydraulic motors will move the gear in the position and lock it in position when it does you'll hear that kind of click and that sound is when these huge landing gears goes out into the air stream you have to remember that when this happens we are flying with probably 300 to 350 km/h so if you take this big landing gear and you put it into an air stream that's moving at 350 km/h you will get a lot of drag so you'll feel that you move forward once again and also you will hear it it'll be this low rumbling noise and that is the just the air flowing past the gear okay perfectly normal so the next thing number four what is up with these changes in trust on final approach why does it go from being fairly uniform during the entire cruise and descent and all of a sudden when you get onto the final approach the aircraft's are moving around all over the place and you can hear the engines revving up and revving down all the time well this is because when we get down into the lower air layers there's going to be more mechanical turbulence so if there's a little bit windy outside or if you're on a nice clear day and the Sun is heating up the surface you'll get these air bubbles that I talked about earlier coming up they cause a bit of turbulence okay and when we're descending into what the runway we need to keep ourselves both bang on the localizer and glide slope okay we are pointing exactly the right way to watch the runway we cannot let the aircraft deviate either left or right or up or down so it becomes more and more important for us to manually keep the aircraft where it's supposed to do when we're descending doesn't really matter but when we're on the glide slope on the localizer you would need to be bang on and that requires more kind of fine-tuning of controls and also as we're getting closer to the runway when we have all of our flaps hanging out we have a smaller speed margin that we need to keep in because we cannot go slower than our minimum speed that will be dangerous and we cannot go much higher either because with all of these flaps hanging out they have a maximum speed because you don't want to put too much pressure on these huge flaps that's hanging out so that gives us a fairly small speed margin so we need to be both very accurate on our speed keeping and very accurate on our lateral and horizontal distance and this means that will be more and smaller changes so the more turbulent it is the more changes you will hear and that is just because we sitting up in the front doing our job getting the aircraft into that sweet spot we need to fly in order to land the aircraft at the correct point on the runway now the last and final point I want to mention are hard or firm landings and use of reversal so when we're flying into Airport especially when we're flying into shorter Airport but any Airport we need we have a very defined area on the runway called a touchdown zone that's where the aircraft is calculated to land it's not in the first part of runway like people might think that we want to land as early as possible it is about 300 metres in on the runway we need to pause the threshold at about 50 feet altitude and then we will come down we will flare and we will land about 300 metres in on the runway that's where we should land and that's where we must land because all of our calculation when it comes to landing distance is based on this okay now a very soft landing normally entails us doing a longer program protracted flare and when we do that we tend to miss at least the beginning of the touchdown zone right we're eating more runway and whenever the aircraft is flying it's eating a lot of runway and if you're flying into a long runway shall the goal London Heathrow wherever it might be that doesn't really matter you have plenty of runway and if you're flying into short runway that might be the difference between landing and having to do a bulk plowing or go around for a while to do that try againsts so this is why professional pilots all aim to learn exactly where they're supposed to 305 metres in that's it no matter how long the runway is that's where this should be landing so we are counting on doing that that's our priority a soft landing might or might not happen it is more important that is a firm landing on the mark then it's a soft landing further in on the runway use of reverses depends a little bit on a couple of things both is runway slippery if it is slippery well then we will use as much reversals as possible in order to reduce a landing distance it also might depend on how quickly you need to turn the aircraft around and go back out again because if we have a short turnaround time well then we might need to use reverses in order to bring a lot of energy away from the brakes so that the brake can cool down and be cool enough in order for us to do our takeoff later on but generally speaking hard braking and a lot of reverses only tends to mean that either a short runway but in most cases we just have different intersections on the runway which we can take in order to taxi back to the terminal so if you have an intersection that you want to take in order to minimize the taxi time we might brake harder then we would do because of runway length we have plenty of runway left but we don't want to spend 10 minutes taxiing so we try to make the first exit so that we can taxi slowly and you know get back to the terminal quickly and get you guys off so that you can go on to whatever you're going to and that tends to be it guys that those are the five biggest reasons that people are nervous during the descent and as always I would like to know if you have more things that you want me to explain maybe there are things that I missed here that you want me to explain further just go into the mentor aviation app just tag at mentor in the chat and I will if I'm in the app I will respond to you directly ok I want to send a huge thank you to the sponsor of this episode which is brilliant dot org now if you haven't checked them out already you really should do ok it is a way to keep your brain active they have loads of interactive really fun interactive courses where you can go in and learn probability for example so that you'll be a better blackjack player or they will give you these kind of brain nuts to crack with a daily challenge every day that will send to you and I highly recommend you to sit down and just spend maybe 10-15 minutes every day to try to crack that one you'll feel better after having done it and if you can't crack it well then they will have a good explanation showing you exactly what it is that you need to think about in order to crack the problem and you will get better at it all right so the five on the first of you who uses this link here below will get a cracking 20% off the annual fee of using brilliant but like I would say it's completely free to go and check it out so go down click the link check it out have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time bye bye right guys I really hope that you like that if you want more content like that motivation content well done check this out I hope that you have subscribed to the channel and that you've highlights little notification belt see you inside of the mentor aviation up and have an absolutely fantastic day bye-bye [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 471,672

Keywords: mentour pilot, mentour pilot turbulence, mentour pilot engine failure, mentour pilot simulator, fear of flying help, fear of flying on a plane, fear of flying documentary, nervous flyer tips, nervous flyers how to relax, nervous flyer video, nervous flyer on plane, Descending, turbulence in flight, why there is turbulence in clouds, turbulence in clouds, Flying, pilot life, How to become a pilot, Flight training, flaps on a plane, hard landing, Reversers, Strange aircraft noise

Id: --ij33RFugs

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019