Passenger Plane Flies Upside Down | Flight

Hey crew, what's going on? Today I'm doing a pilot reaction video on the flight movie starring Denzel Washington. If you're not familiar with it, basically Denzel has a drinking problem and he goes flying when he's drunk after having a long night of partying with one of the flight attendants. In one of the famous scenes of the movie he's actually flying the plane inverted and I had some people asking me when I did the pilot reaction video on American Made, they were asking me some of the technical aspects of this movie and how real it was. So we're going to go over this movie and see how real it is. I got a couple aviation clips and we'll watch those together. I'm going to start off with the trailer and then we'll go from there. Good morning, Katrina. Good morning, Captain Whitaker. He's a manifest with 102 souls on board. Let's get him tucked in. We're ready to push. How are you feeling, man? Look like you pulled some kind of move up there, man. He saved a lot of lives. We are in a dive. I have no control on my side. Everybody embrace positions. The way you landed that plane was nothing short of a miracle. I see nothing but ashes. Evan, listen to me. Trim us nose down. The plane fell apart at 30,000 feet. We're gonna roll it. What do you mean roll it? Ready? Here we go. The NTSB hearing's in 10 days. You're under the microscope right now. Are you hiding something? You gonna shoot me? Can I come inside? Yeah, come on inside. I'll shoot you inside. This was an act of God. Those God would do this. Our investigators concluded the aircraft failed. The FAA placed 10 pilots in simulators, recreated the events. Every pilot killed everybody on board. You were the only one who could do it. You saved my mom. I want to talk about the days leading up to the accident. This thing is so heavy, it's killing me. I drank the night before the flight. Does Whitaker know he's going to jail? My clients don't go to jail. It's a lie, Wim. It's a lie. I'm trying to save your life. We lost all power. Wait for impact. No one could have landed that plane like I did. So you saw there in that last clip, the plane gets inverted and you can see the engines are on fire. I've seen this movie obviously before. Came out a few years back. I liked it. It's a good movie. It really is. There are some things that aren't quite accurate as far as for what would happen in an actual crew scenario. And then there's some aviation aspects of it that don't quite mash up. But there is some stuff that's very real. And there's some things that he does in this movie that are really good learning experiences that you can hopefully take out of that and apply. And I'll kind of get into that when we get into this video here. Oh, and one last thing before we start this video. Who the **** are you? My name's Kelsey. I'm a 747 pilot. This channel is all about aviation. So whether you're a pilot or just an aviation enthusiast, consider subscribing. All right, let's get into this film. Let's go to the first clip. We've flown together before? I don't think so, sir. You sure? Yeah. Ken Evans. Whittaker. Nice to meet you. My pleasure. That's pretty accurate. Usually you're flying with, especially the airlines, you're flying with random people all the time. So you may have seen somebody passing them in a jet bridge or in the airport or in the crew room, something like that. So that's pretty normal to have that scenario. Oxygen check. Now, I've done this before where they say, if you're really tired, that taking that oxygen really will help oxygenate your blood and wake you up. And I've had really early morning flights and I thought, okay, maybe I'll try this and see if it works. Cause you're supposed to check the oxygen anyways. I put it on just to see, and I didn't really, some people, it seems to work. Some people have told me, Oh man, I feel so much better and everything's really clear. And the lights are really clear. It doesn't really have any effect on me, but I want you to notice when he puts the oxygen mask on and you see the tubes that are around the outside and they expand and they get big. The actual oxygen is going in there. And the reason for that is when you click that mask, when you pull it out, you grab the two little nozzles that he's using that expands those bands essentially. So you can pull that out. And with one hand, those bands will then go around your head and then you let go and it will clamp onto your face. So you notice when he pulls that, when he pulls that out, you see those bands actually inflate. That's the reason why it does that. Checks. You want it? No, thank you, sir. Sure. Yes, sir. Okay. How are you feeling today, sir? A little tired. Quick turnaround for me. 10 turns in three days. Off tomorrow. When you do the oxygen check, you do not put the mask on generally. Usually you'll pull it out and make sure that there's it's clean. Coffee hasn't spilled over it. Some guys will just hit the button and make sure that it's actually blowing through your speaker system, meaning the mic inside the oxygen mask is working in the event that you need to put it on, that you're able to talk on the radio through your oxygen mask. But normally you don't have guys put it on. And if they do, you have them clean it because it can be filthy. That's that scene. 80 knots. Cross check. It's like a video game, right? 30 knot crosswind. Exercise the old. Stink the muscle. V1 and rotate. We're at a positive rate. You're out. So just one thing here. You've obviously heard of sterile cockpit where there's no additional talking below 10,000 feet. And a lot of times that doesn't happen where there's no additional chatter, but almost always on the takeoff roll, it's business. You don't have guys making additional comments or things like that. 99% of the time, you wouldn't generally get a guy making jokes like that on takeoff. The departure. This is Southjet 227. We got some rough chop. I'd say monitoring two. I'd say severe turbulence. Definitely severe turbulence. No meal service today. What are you doing? Leveling off. Now you're generally not going to ever have a guy say severe turbulence, especially when he's leaving on a departure because severe turbulence means you're going to have momentary loss of control of the aircraft. And you're generally not going to have air traffic control departing people into a situation where you're going to have severe turbulence in the first, I don't know, they're probably 1,500, 2,000 feet. You're generally not going to have air traffic control or tower send you out, send out a departure into something like that. That's not a general scenario. Number of black between those two ugly clouds. That's a pocket of smooth air squatting right over Kissimmee. We're going to thread the needle. Turn us right 30 degrees. Departure, Southjet 227. We need to deviate 30 degrees right. For weather. For weather. Southjet 227, 30 degrees right approved. Oh Lord. Can't help you now, brother. Southjet 227, say altitude. What should I say? Tell them we're climbing. Uh, departure. We're leaving 900,000 for flight level 180. We're approaching our maximum airspeed. Damn right. We need the speed to punch through this crap. Just work with me. You're over speeding, sir. Trying to get out of this shitty air. If that's all right with you, junior. Departure, this is Southjet 227. We're experiencing some rough air, encountering some severe down drafts. We're in our blind now. Sir, look at your airspeed. You're way too fast in this rough air. I'm right on the line. Settle down. Thank God that's over. So there's a few things here that don't make a lot of sense. One, every plane is going to have a rough air penetration speed, or some it's going to be called something like that, which is basically regardless of how bad the weather is, that plane is going to be able to withstand any of the turbulence that's created from the storm. You're never going to be accelerating into a thunderstorm in order to climb above it. You might accelerate before you get to a thunderstorm to get through a hole or something like that, but you're never going to be essentially riding that little red and black thing that's called the barber pole that you saw him right on. You're never going to be riding that barber pole is what it's called. And that barber pole is essentially the max safe speed that that aircraft can handle. You're never going to be riding right on that while you're getting into moderate turbulence. That's just not something that you're going to do. The other thing is obviously he's doing well above 250 knots below 10,000. Now you can do that in a heavy jet because you're going to have the clearance in order to do that, accelerate above 250, below 10, at least in the US and some other countries. He's flying a mad dog or it's a version of a McDonnell Douglas, they call them mad dogs. So MD mad dog, you're not going to be doing above 250 below 10. You're not going to be accelerating into a thunderstorm in order to climb above it. And then he's saying there's a patch of smooth air between those two storms. There's really no way to know that. Usually if you're going to have two huge cells next to each other, you're going to have a piece of black area. You're going to want to head to that. Assuming that it's not, there's not a huge wall in front of it. If you see a bunch of red and then there's black behind that on your radar, that black behind that is what's called attenuation, which means the weather is so strong at the front part of that, that it can't even get to the backside to see what's behind it. We'll talk about that at another time, but essentially there's two large cells in this, in this clip here, and he's trying to get in between those, which would make sense, but you wouldn't necessarily know it's going to be smooth air. And you would always be trying to go up, not stay low to get over it. That would be no way to know that that's actually going to be happening. So let's get into this next scene. And how long has sleeping duty been out? 26 minutes. We're going to start descending any second now. Well, it looks like you'll need to wake him up. Southjet 227, Atlantis. Descend and maintain flight level 300, Southjet 227. What is that? The elevator feels really stiff, son. All right, don't force. All right, Marvin, get everybody strapped in. Get everybody strapped in tight. Ladies and gentlemen. Turn left hard, sir. Pull on my side. No control at all, sir. Lost hydraulics. Center, this is Southjet 227. We've lost our hydraulics and feels like our pitch control. Southjet 227, Atlantis. Turn on the backup pumps, the backup pumps. That is affirmed. We're in an uncontrolled descent. Southjet 227, Atlantis. Say your attentions. Yes, everybody's belted in. So he's thinking he's lost his hydraulics because generally, well, I'm guessing on this plane, the hydraulics control the elevator and possibly the ailerons. It's different on every plane, but I'm guessing that's why he's saying turn on the backup pumps. He's thinking that they lost hydraulics on one of the systems is trying to go to a backup system to regain pressure so they can regain control of the elevator. Belted in with everybody in brake positions. Yes, that is affirmed. We are in a dive. We are in a dive. We have lost vertical control. We're going to need drag. I want you to throw out everything you got, the speed brakes, the gear, everything. Gear, speed brakes. Gear's down. I don't think hydraulics is the problem, sir. We need to dump the fuel. Do it. So you heard the first officer say gear's down. I don't think hydraulics is a problem. Generally speaking, on a lot of aircrafts, the gear is extended and locked in place through a hydraulic system. So he's basically saying, well, the gear is going down and it's locked into place. So I don't think the reason that our elevator is not working is because of a hydraulic system. And then he's saying dump the fuel, which if you've seen any air crash investigations, when a plane crashes and it's empty, it doesn't have any fuel. Obviously, it's going to be a much smaller explosion. And I'm guessing that's the logic right here in dumping the fuel. This is Southjet 227. We're in an uncontrolled dive descending out of 21,000 feet. We're declaring an emergency. We dumped our fuel. We got a jammed stabilizer or something. We need a block of altitude to work the problem and a heading to the nearest airport. Just do it. Do it. 30 degrees. You saw him reach down and say he's reverting to manual control. And again, never flown a Mad Dog. So if you're a Mad Dog pilot or you fly the McDonnell Douglas plane, don't get upset. But this is basically what I think is occurring on a lot of aircrafts. You have where that guy's reaching in the motion that he's doing, pulling that thing up, turning it and releasing it on a lot of aircrafts like the CRJ has this where it will split. If you have a jammed elevator or a jammed aileron, it will split the systems so you can regain control of half of the system. Now, one of the pilots is going to have control of the aileron, whichever side is not jammed. He's going to now be able to regain control. Ninety nine percent of the time when you're flying, if you run into an emergency, you're going to have a book and it's going to walk you through all the procedures that you need to do in sequence from the manufacturer. Says do one, two, three, four, five, six. And it's going to walk you through everything you need to do in this scenario. Obviously, it's a totally they don't have a they don't have time and be it's a non-normal situation where they're in an uncontrolled descent. So the captain is making decisions on the fly, trying to trying to do anything in order to save the aircraft. You heard the F.O. say they're too fast for dumping all the flaps. In this scenario, he's basically doing trying anything. Let's throw anything at it, throw anything at the wall and see what sticks. There's actually a crash that did happen in real life that's very similar to this. And I'll talk about it at the end of the video. Oh, lord, we're going to see nothing but evidence. When I say I want you to retract the flaps, retract the gear, trim us nose down. OK, but everything's going to be opposite. So make sure you trim us nose down. What are you going to do when I tell you I want you to push these forward full power, full throttle. Can you do that? OK, what are we doing? Why would I trim down? We're going to roll it. What do you mean roll it? You got to do something to stop this guy. I've got control. Jesus! Speed brake! Oh Jesus, we're inverted! Listen, we're level. We can maintain altitude like this. Are you OK? Atlanta 7, this is SouthJet 227. We are inverted. I repeat, we are inverted. SouthJet 227, uh, did you say inverted? We're losing all pressure, both failure, both fire in the left engine. Put it out. Now, in my last video, somebody actually commented and asked me about this and I wasn't sure what he was talking about. So you saw it said low oil pressure and then the engines now catching on fire. Your oil is going to be continually moving through parts of the engine and going back into a reservoir, if you will. I will use this as an example. If the oil is coming in here and it's coming out here and this bottom portion is where it's actually going back to the engine to help lubricate everything. If you were to now invert the plane, we're inverted. I feel like I'm on a scene. I feel like I'm in Top Gun right now. We're inverted. Because I was inverted. If you were to invert it and now this same area where the, where the oil is used to be trying to get pulled out of, it's now empty, right? So it has no oil. And if it's trying to suck oil out of that and there's no oil that's going, obviously these engines are running really hot and they're going to heat up. Now there's no lubrication. How long would that take? I don't know, but that would be my understanding of how, why there'd be low oil pressure and why the engine would now catch on fire is the plane would be inverted and therefore the oil where it's trying to come out of, it can't grab anything. I see a field and a road ahead of us. We're going to set it down there. Roger 227. Oh no, fire in the right now. We're losing the left engine. Southjet 227, I see you descending through one. He's pulling those fire handles. The engines are still producing thrust. That's not really how it all the fuel, anything that's going into that engine that could be creating a fire is basically it's cutting all that stuff off. So he's pulling that fire extinguisher handle. Now it's going to cut off all fuel and everything that would be going in there that would, would be creating thrust. So the fact that he's pulling it and it's still generating thrust, this doesn't make sense because how would you kill a fire? You would killed what's creating it. And obviously fuel is one of the things that it's going to be cut off. Every plane's got usually five or six things that are getting cut off when you pull that handle. But fuel is definitely one of the things that would be creating a fire, obviously. So when you pull the fuel, you're basically killing that engine. It's not going to be producing thrust anymore. All right. You kind of know what happens from there. There's a few things that the, that, that I want to point out to you that happened in this video that are hopefully tools that you can use and hopefully you will never need them. But one is that he did really well is that he was using a crew resource management. He had a flight attendant. He brought the flight attendant up to help to give thrust to the engines, which wouldn't have worked because they killed the power. But the idea is good. He's basically using all available resources to try to land this plane. The second thing is, is as he's getting close to landing, air traffic control is talking to him and asking him, will you confer that concur this or you whatever, whatever it was that they were asking him some questions. And he was trying to get this plane spun around the land. As you'll remember from probably early in flight school, or what you'll learn as you get early into flight school is priority is to aviate, aviate, navigate, communicate. And that's exactly what he's doing. He's flying the plane. First air traffic control can wait the people in the back of the plane and the rest of your crew. They're relying on you. So first things first aviate. The last thing that I really liked that he did is he never gave up. Obviously that there was a real life accident that happened off the coast of LA. I want to say it was like 2001, 2000, something around that time. It was an Alaskan flight and they had basically the exact same thing that happened in this movie. And this movie I think is based off of that accident in part. And those pilots did the exact same thing in real life that what Denzel's basically doing here, except for they weren't high on drugs and drunk, but it was the same concept. These pilots were fighting until the very end. They were trying everything. And even they actually inverted the plane as well in real life. Now, were they doing that for the reason that Denzel was is try to prevent the plane from getting into a steep dive. I honestly, I don't know, but they did invert the plane and they, they eventually crashed into the ocean and everybody died. But the point of this is, is never give up. You always have a chance. You're always in the fight. And until the very bitter end, if there's one thing I can instill in you is don't ever quit. Now this happened to me. I was in a simulator very early on in my career and they'd give me some weird thing and the plane was veering off course and it wasn't doing what I'd wanted it to do. So I just stopped, I just kind of stopped flying the plane and look back to the instructor. I was like, Hey, can we reset the sim? And let's just try that again. And he started screaming at me, which is a little bit unnecessary, but the message that I got through all of his yelling was stop treating this like a simulator and start treating it like a real plane. And don't ever, ever stop fighting. He's like, I don't care if you're doing everything wrong. I want to see you try a million different things. I'd rather see you fight until that plane hits the ocean or hits the mountain, then stop and go, I don't understand what's happening. And that's something that's happening here. Denzel is fighting to the bitter end for himself, his crew, and all the passengers that are on board. That's something about him in this movie that I really like and something that hopefully if you are ever in an accident situation that you remember fight until the bitter end, try everything to keep yourself and your crew and everybody on board alive. All right, crew, that wraps up this pilot reaction video that I did on Denzel Washington's flight movie. In the comment section below, if you have any other questions about this movie or any other technical questions that you want to ask, please write them down. But what I also want to know is what questions you have about aviation in general that you would like to see a video about. Put that in the comment section, and I'll try to make a video on some of the big topics that I think would be helpful to people. I look forward to hearing from you. Until then, keep the blue side up!