Is Wake Turbulence More Dangerous Than You Think? (Audio-Only Version)

Interactive Transcript

Speaker A Foreign.

Speaker B Hi, everyone, and very welcome to yet another episode of Captains Speaking. My name is Peter Hornfeld, as always, and together with me I have.

Speaker A Hey, everybody. I am Ben Watts, as always, and today is a very special podcast because it's Petter Hornfeld's birthday. So happy birthday, Peter.

Speaker B Thank you. Yeah, so it's not going to be on the day that you listen to this, but it is on the day that we're recording it. So thank you very much, Ben.

Speaker A Yeah. And you don't look a day over 75, I reckon. I reckon you're looking good.

Speaker B Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B People. People never will never know that I'm 70.

Speaker A No, no, you're doing good. Yeah, yeah, the skincare is working.

Speaker B Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So it's. It's been a pretty busy week for you, I've heard.

Speaker A I've been busy, yeah, it's been really busy for a lot of you that if you. This is going, going back a week now for you guys. There was a lot of delays across Europe today, well, recently because of cyber attacks and so on, on Collins Aerospace and there's been some air traffic control delays. So for all of us that have been out there flying pretty hectic. I actually had a fairly, fairly unusual day actually a couple of days ago. We were. It's one of those days, you know, I said my. One of those rosters this week where you have to kind of sit down when you open it up. It was a massive four sector training days and I look at it and go, my goodness. But yeah, that when you're actually doing them, I'm enjoying it. But when you open the roster and you go, oh, my God, here we go. Okay, I need to have a little sit down here. But it was one of those days anyway. We were doing London to Barcelona, Barcelona back again, and then London to Nuremberg initially and then back, which wasn't too bad of a day, to be honest. But, you know, Barcelona. Petty, you've flown to Barcelona. Yeah.

Speaker B Is it too. I mean, Barcelona is always busy and especially the groundwork, that's the thing you see. Like from, from London to Barcelona, you'd have a 2:15 or something. 2 hours 15 time, which is okay. But then you don't really calculate on the fact that it takes you almost half an hour to taxi in and out.

Speaker A It's huge. It is huge. Yeah, it's huge. And it's. We use an air bridge there rather than front and back steps, don't we? Which means boarding and disembarking takes twice as Long.

Speaker B I don't think people really understand that. That's something that we should probably mention now while we're on it. And before I go into that, Navin is gesticulating in the background here saying, don't forget to tell people that you can listen to this podcast on other platforms than just YouTube. You can go to Spotify, you can go to anywhere where you find your favorite podcast and listen to this. So please, we love you here on YouTube, we love you to stay here. But if you want to listen to it in your car or somewhere else, then maybe you can listen to it on a different platform as well.

Speaker A Well remembered. I think that was a record for you.

Speaker B Yeah, I think that's the quickest I've ever remembered to talk about that. But anyway, so there is a great advantage with being able to use steps, external steps, to both board and disembark an aircraft. And of course, most people that are listening to this, especially if you're in the United States, you would be used to just going through what we call the finger, which is an air bridge which is connected to the front left side of the aircraft and you go in and out through that. If you're doing long haul flights, there might be a finger that's connecting on two different places, but you're always going through the finger. But low fare airlines love using the external steps and having people board from the, from the apron or at least from the back side and the front side. And what's the reason for that?

Speaker A Just time. Efficient use of time makes it super quick.

Speaker B Yep, that's the thing. It's very hard to actually. It doesn't cut it in half, but it shaves off a good 10 minutes easy of boarding and disembarking. And it also has some other benefits when it comes to weight and balance while you're boarding. It's very hard to get the aircraft back heavy.

Speaker A Yeah, correct.

Speaker B Using this because you're actually boarding at the same time from both directions.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B Whilst when you're using them, when you're using the finger, people think, well, why would the aircraft become back heavy when you're using the finger? Because people are going towards the front. Right. It should be front heavy. But the fact is that especially during the winter when people have to put on their jackets and stuff, what happens is that everyone in the front leaves early, they get up, they take a jacket and they go out and then the people in the back, they stay back a bit because you know it's going to take a while for the front ones. To get out. So you kind of sit down, you chill, and then you get up and you take your jackets on. So what happens is that almost the entire front part of the aircraft empties out and the back part of the aircraft is still full of passengers. And I've been in. I've been based out of Barcelona when I've been going out, doing the walk around, and I've seen the front strut being completely extended, just about to start tipping backwards, basically. So I've been onto the headset. We always have a headset connected in the front and like telling the first officer, stop the disembarkation now, because what happens then is you. If you tell the flight attendants to stop the disembarkation, they hold the passengers, which means that they form up a queue in the front. So now you get that counterweight in the front, which enables the people from the back to start moving forward again. But that's things that you never encounter when you're getting people up on both of the staff.

Speaker A No. And it's happened, isn't it? There's been photos of aircraft literally rotating on the stands up towards the sky where that has happened. It's something you'll be really aware of. It's so easy if you're not careful. The cabin crew are really aware of it now, aren't they? They're very good at, you know, kind of blocking that door.

Speaker B Yeah. But we are the ones. We are the ones who see it when we do the walk around and you see that extended strut in the front, you know that now you. You need to act quickly before this becomes a real problem.

Speaker A Yeah. So that's. So that's the joys of working somewhere like that. So we were. We kind of got it started quite promising as a day. It's a bit of an emotional roller coaster because we started today knowing we had a long day. The aircraft was coming late inbound. So we were. The aircraft we were taking over still was airborne, still had half an hour to come. So we're sitting there with the crew. I'm like, oh, man. So anyway, it's gonna be one of those days as. As lates often are. And then we see on our electronic flight bag, the last two sectors disappear, they suddenly removed. And we're like, oh, win. They've opposite seen that with the aircraft's running late. Rather than delay those two flights, they've obviously allocated another crew to do those on time. We're just doing Barcelona, Win. Great. Anyway, everyone's really happy you're Kind of just chatting away about the day. And then suddenly, about 10 minutes later, two more sectors pop on. And this time it's going to Baden Baden, which is in Germany. It's a little bit closer than Nuremberg, I think it was. But the departure time to Baden Baden was about 10 minutes after we were supposed to arrive from Barcelona. So we knew that was never going to work. But anyway, we kind of set off to Barcelona, eventually get down to Barcelona, get on stand, get this boarding underway, and all of a sudden now we get this massive air traffic control slot. A slot is a window of opportunity. We have to get airborne. So it was like three hours in the future. So we're sitting there on stand now, already about 40 minutes late because of these ATC delays. And we've got another departure time in three hours. You've got a window to make that five minutes before that time or 10 minutes after it. So. Oh, man. Okay. There's no way we're going to do these last two sectors now. So that's the silver lining with this thing. Okay, it's going to be fine. And we let the cabin crew know, let the passengers know. We're kind of liaising with ops to try and minimize this delay. We can look at different routings and so on, and it does actually come forward. And we end up closing up, starting up massive half an hour taxi to Runway 24, left in Barcelona. Get airborne. Lovely flight home. And when we're airborne, as you know, Peter, we lose connectivity with the outside world with regards to anything that's going on. So once we get our AFB goes into airplane mode, we have no idea what's going on in the outside world. So we kind of land in Stansted tentatively. Come on, stand. Turn that EFB on to see. Okay. Is it just the two sectors? Are we going home? And then we have a bit of a curveball, rather than seeing four sectors on there that we had when we left. So Barcelona and Nuremberg, we're hoping for two. We see three.

Speaker B Oh, no.

Speaker A Yes.

Speaker B Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker A Okay, this is not good. So Baden Baden has Carlsruhe. Baden Baden has a night curfew, like a lot of places in Germany. There's a lot of places in Germany where you have what we call a night curfew, which is to protect the local neighborhoods from airplane noise. And Baden Baden's one of them. So the, like, the latest, you can get airborne from Baden Baden, I think midnight local or $23.59. And we would have. We would have exceeded that. So we phone up ops and go, look, guys, what's going on? And they go, look, there's a plan A and a plan B. Plan A is you fly to Baden Baden, you get there before the curfew. We've called a crew off standby in Bad and Baden because it's a base. We're commissioning an aircraft as we speak to fly the passengers to do the return sector back to London. The plan A is you get to Baden Baden, you can land, get everybody off, shut the aircraft down and then peg it over to the aircraft that will be next to you, come back as passengers, you get back home. Plan B is you miss that flight because they have to get airborne before it has to be wheels up before 23:59. Plan B, if you don't make that, we're going to put you in a hotel, you're deadhead back as a passenger the following morning. Okay? Right, fine. Just to add insult to injury, we've also been given a slot to bas to bun bun for us.

Speaker B Yeah, I recognize that, but it's kind of, I don't know. Before you continue, I don't know how you feel about these things, but generally when things start to get that complicated, you kind of mentally give up on it being a nice, like an easy day. And you just kind of start to enjoy the game of trying to make it as good as possible under the circumstances. And you start laughing with your colleague. It's like, I guess I bet this is going to happen now. And it always happens.

Speaker A That's all it does. It does. It's funny you should say that because I was, I was saying this to Navin earlier. Actually, there's a part of me that does enjoy it. There's the chaos, of course, the tiredness. You want to be home. But there's an element to the uncertainty, uncertainty of it, the unpredictability that I kind of like. I think that's part of the job, isn't it?

Speaker B And we've discussed this before, we talked about it, the fact that it's actually when you have problems that your skill as a commander has to be shown. Because on a day to day basis when everything goes as it should, then you are pilot flying and pilot monitoring every other sector. Both you and your first officer does pretty much the same job with some small exceptions. But there's no real, like, there's no need for you to exercise your, your command experience. But when things start to go wrong, this is where you really first of all show why you get the higher salary. But also that's where you need to shine. Because when you have pilot, you know, you have passengers that are extremely delayed, cabin crew that's getting tired. First off, as you might be getting tired, you have to put that judgment into the mix and dealing with it in the best possible way and keeping everyone in a good mood. It's not easy.

Speaker A No, you very much have to wear the management hat, don't you? You become a manager of the operation, liaising with all different elements of the operation, whether it's the ground crew, the dispatchers, the passengers, cabin crew, ops, whatever it might be. You're there trying to make this whole game work as efficiently as you can and you are having to think of everything, things that other people might forget, because if you forget it, then it's going to cause you issues down the line, which is.

Speaker B It's interesting as well, because this is something that we discuss a lot when it comes to the job as being a captain, that you are the one that has the whole picture while all of the different stakeholders around you are very proficient and good at what they do. So you might have a very good dispatcher, for example, you might dealing with a very good crew controller, ops controller in your company or handling agents or whatever it might be. But they only have their specific slice of the operation which they prioritize. Like for the dispatcher needs to get the aircraft dispatched and wants to get paperwork out and wants to get you on the way. And the ground handlers obviously are putting on and taking off the bags and the fueler wants to fuel and all of that, they all do their thing. But as a commander, to a certain extent, also the first officer, but definitely as the captain, you are the one that has to make all of these people work together in a cohesive way so that the operation gets on the way.

Speaker A Absolutely. It's. And you're looking at. We're thinking of everything. We're looking to make sure that the crew are fit. Was a crew called off standby for this? Maybe they've been on duty longer than I have that maybe no one's thought about and can they do this delayed flight and so on. There's so many things you got to be thinking about and. But anyway, we kind of made that. We, we got. We had a plan. We're like, fine, we'll go. We ended up going off to Baden Baden. Very short flight, hour and 15 minutes or so. And we're looking at the time. We're looking. Okay, we're going to be on stand about 15 minutes before that aircraft needs to depart. So we're like, okay, this is going to be, it's doable, it's, but it's, it's, it's tight. It could go either way. It reminded me of those, remember the old Top Gear races where some Richard Hammond and May and Clarkson want to be on a train, one will be in an airplane, one will be in a car and they got a race and you're like, who's going to make it a little bit like that. And I think, yeah, it's just going.

Speaker B Because that's, you know, to make people understand this If, I mean 15 minutes sounds like it's a lot. But remember, you have 15 minutes. If you land 15 minutes before they have to get off, that means that you need to get on the shocks, you need to start disembarking, get all of the passengers disembarked, you need to secure down the aircraft, do the shutdown and the secure checklist, turn it off, retract the stairs, close the doors and go. And that's in 15 minutes. So it's, it is tight.

Speaker A It is, it's really tight. It could really gone either way. And we, and the thing, the danger that I said to the FO said, look, the danger here is we rush. And that's where mistakes happen. So as much as we do not want to be away from home tonight, we want to get home. Once we close this door, we're just going to keep it standard. We just do it as we always do because that we, we all know that the consequences are rushing. But it takes a bit of a kind of forethought to be aware that you don't fall into that trap because it's so easy, isn't it, to fall into that trap of just single mindedly going anyway, we kind of, we get there, we land, we're taxiing onto stand and we can see our aircraft. And what we're hoping for is that aircraft has got a big queue of passengers on it waiting to queue up. So we got, okay, we've got time taxing on to stand. We can see like the last passengers going up the stairs. Oh man, this is going to be, this is tight. And come on, stand, shut down, shut down checks, open the door, passengers start coming off and passengers in no rush at all. You can see the cabin crew then, they're wanting to scream at them and kick him out the door probably. But they're like, sir, can I help you with that bag? You know, bring it down. And they're being super, super polite. And anyway, we Get. We get them off, we do the shutdown checks and it's now like five minutes to go. And we're thinking, okay, we might make this. And then we find out that the, the ground ops controller comes up, the head of ops, lovely guy, by the way, and says, look, that aircraft next to you, they've also got a slot. They've got to be closing up in one minute. Can you guys get off this aircraft there in one minute? Now, the cabin crew were just getting their bits and their VP is off the back still down the back. And I said, I don't think so. Anyway, I said, guys, if you can make it, make it. So they came running down the thing, we came down the steps of our aircraft, we literally got onto the apron and then we could hear the airstairs retracting on that.

Speaker B We looked at each other, because that's the thing. In the other cockpit, there are two pilots that are looking at a slot that they know that they can under no circumstances miss. So their priority is going to be to get themselves and their passengers over. And obviously they would like to help you guys, but if in a similar situation, you would be the same. No, this does not work. I cannot strand all of these passengers here because we wanted to wait another minute for those guys.

Speaker A It doesn't happen, it doesn't work. No, in a normal day they would hang around, but they've got to be wheels up at 23:59 or they're stuck here as well with all those passengers. So they did the right thing. But we just watched this Airstairs, we watched them start off and we're like, okay, now what? So plan B. And the ops controller, Marcus, actually, I said, I'll give him a shout out. He knew about. He watches the podcast, He's a big fan of the podcast.

Speaker B Awesome.

Speaker A Absolute gentleman. He went over and above that night. He should have finished and be on his way home. And he stayed and made sure we were well looked after. So we went into the ops room with Marcus and the crew phoned ops and go, look, okay, plan B, we didn't make that flight. And okay, leave it with us, we'll get you a hotel. Because they couldn't have pre booked it because they were hoping we would have got on that flight. Now, just about insult to injury in this, we found out that there's a fest, a music festival in Baden Baden that night.

Speaker B Of course, that's what I was talking about. And there's no way that these things are connected. No, it's just like one thing after the other. Yeah.

Speaker A So there's no, there's no. We're sitting there now for like half an hour, 40 minutes. It's like two in the morning now we're at one in the morning. I'm like, okay, we've heard nothing. So I found an ops and go look, we're really, we're working, we're trying to find you a hotel. There's nothing out there. Everything's fully booked. And a lot of hotels in Germany are in that area. Apparently like close at half eight, nine o' clock at night, reception closes, which I found very strange. But they couldn't get through to a lot of them. So yeah, we couldn't get a hotel. Anyway, we're there in the end for the best part of two hours while they're desperately trying to find us a hotel. We end up finding a hotel in a different country. So we end up having to go to Strasbourg to get the hotel. So now we're told, okay, look Ben, we've got your hotel finally, it's in Strasbourg. We boarded you a taxi. It's going to be there in 15 minutes. The drive is about an hour maybe, maybe a bit less if you're lucky. So we're like, okay, fine. So we end up getting, piling this into this taxi. We drive best part of an hour to Strasbourg. Get into this hotel and there's all roadworks around Strasbourg. So he couldn't drop us at the hotel. So he said, look, it's about a two minute walk that way. You okay? I said, yeah, it's fine, just let us out. And then he said to us, just be careful. This is a really dodgy part of town. There's a lot of muggins here. And then he closed the door and drove off.

Speaker B Of course it did. You don't want to be stuck there.

Speaker A Yeah, we are in pilot uniforms and we're like, oh God. Okay. This would be a great ending to the night. But anyway, we managed to find this hotel without getting mugged. And. Yeah. Then unfortunately the flight back the next morning was like relatively early in the morning. So we ended up getting about three or four hours sleep to position back as passengers. And, and we got back. But the silver lining was I had the rest of the day off when I did get back, but that was my 24 hours anyway.

Speaker B Cool. Well, meanwhile I got up, I had a nice breakfast in the morning, I, I drove my kids. Well, I had a, you know, a nice, nice cup of coffee with my wife. Then I drove my kids to, to school. And then I went in here and I. I did a couple of video preparations and a video and. And then I went home and that was my day. People are wondering why. Why I took a leap of absence for a while. Like, to be perfectly honest, though, when I hear these stories, I do feel a little bit like getting back into the fray because even though they are on the day, a real pain, it actually turns out that those are the kind of days that you remember and if you're with a good crew as well, you kind of laugh it off. And I don't really enjoy the whole sleeping just three, four hours and going back again because I. I prefer actually to stay a little bit longer because then you can have a nice breakfast with the crew and maybe go out and see something and then take an afternoon flight back. You're not going to be flying anyway. You're going to be. When you get back after a day like that, you're going to be absolutely knackered. There's nothing you can do. I always prefer to get my sleep.

Speaker A Me too.

Speaker B Seven hours. Seven, eight hours of sleep. Tonight?

Speaker A Yeah. Yeah, I slept well last night, let's put it that way. But yeah, but any plans for your birthday before we go on to the next bit?

Speaker B Oh, so, no, today. Today's Monday, when we record this. And actually my. My lovely wife Sandra had completely surprised me with. With a motorcycle for my birthday. But she also understood that it was like, this is really the beginning of autumn now. And it's funny because down here, around the Mediterranean, they say that each season has three months and it starts in particular dates and almost to the day you can see a change in weather. So actually she gave me the motorcycle on Saturday because the weather was like 27 degrees in sun and I could go out with my friends and I could enjoy it. And we went out on this route up in the mountains here and had coffee, like it was lovely. And then we had. Me and Sandra, we went out in the evening, had dinner, and we went to a concert like, it was the best day ever. And today it's like 14 degrees of rain. And it switches like that here. And then it is literally now there's going to be three months of autumn and then in the, you know, like the 22nd or so of December, starts three months of winter and then starts to. And it's. I mean, we're talking. It might be variations with two, three days for and back, but it's extremely. Like, I laugh at that because in Sweden. In Sweden you can have summer into September.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B But most Likely you have summer into beginning of August and then it's autumn. Like there can be months of difference between the different seasons, but down here, no. So to answer your question, I am going to probably have. I'm going to go to the gym after we finish this and I'm going to go home. Well, actually I'm going to record a Metropilot episode and then I'm going to go home and we're going to have some cake tonight, maybe eat some sushi.

Speaker A Very nice.

Speaker B And then it's, you know, it's, it's, it's a working week, so back to normal again. But I mean, it's not like when you're, when you're turning 44, which I am today, it's not like dark birthday is the one and only thing that.

Speaker A Happens to you five in the morning, itching to open your presents then.

Speaker B No, I actually woke up this morning and I think that's the first time that's happened to me and I did not realize it was my birthday. And that was probably. Yeah, it was probably because I had had basically the best day ever on Saturday. And we didn't celebrate it because it's bad luck to celebrate your birthday before your birthday in, in Spain. That's, that's what they say. So it was, it was not the official celebration, but it kind of was a celebration. We had an awesome day. I, I didn't, I didn't miss anything. But otherwise, you know, just like I said, we are going to. I'm going to Copenhagen.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B In the middle of the week to do our keynote speech about leadership and communication, which I'm really looking forward to. But apart from that, nothing special.

Speaker A Well, sounds good. Well, so if we go on to what we're going to talk about, one of the first things we're going to talk about. Wake turbulence.

Speaker B Wake turbulence, yes. Why are we talking about wake turbulence, Ben?

Speaker A We're talking about wake turbulence because I actually had a little bit of it a little while ago. That's why we had it. Which I thought would be quite an interesting thing to talk about. Now, wake turbulence, first of all, should we talk about what wake turbulence is? Do you want to. How would you define wake turbulence?

Speaker B Okay, so wake turbulence, when a wing creates lift, it does so by. It's a couple of different things that are involved, but one of the ways that it does it is it increases the, the, the pressure on the lower part of the wing and it decreases the pressure on the upper part of the wing. That's why the wing is shaped the way it is. And that's what happens when you angle a wing into the airstream so you create a little bit of lower pressure above and upper pressure. But now the thing with pressures, and this goes for weather and it goes for everything, is that the pressures will always try to equalize themselves. It wants to, it wants to find an equilibrium. So if you have a high pressure underneath something and a low pressure above, the air is going to want to go from the high pressure to the low pressure. And the only real way that it can do that on the wing is on the wing tips. So on the wingtips as you're flying and you're creating these conditions, you will see the air going from below and up to top and creates this vortices that just propagates. And the more lift you take up, the more strong these vortexes will be. And they, you know, we don't really want them. This is why you see winglets and things like that. We want to make sure that we, that we, that we minimize those vortexes because they actually cost energy for the aircraft. But, but it's impossible to completely eradicate them.

Speaker A Yeah, but this, what these vortices do is they, they flow backwards out kind of from the both winglets rotating back behind it, and they gradually kind of disperse laterally out and they descend. And the downside to that particularly, and it's, it's directly proportional to the weight of the aircraft. So the heavier the aircraft, as Petta said, the more lift it needs to produce, the more lift, the greater that pressure differential. So the stronger these vortices, they're like horizontal tornadoes. Think of them that way.

Speaker B They look like it. They look exactly like horizontal tornadoes. If you go out now, you're watching this and you go and Google wake vortices, you'll see how they look. And if you ever go out to an airport, this is something I actually recommend people to do. If you stand on the extended center line of a Runway and you hear there's a big jet coming over landing just a few seconds after, you're going to hear this like whip sounding is.

Speaker A Like exactly what it sounds like.

Speaker B Yeah. And that is those vortexes falling down to the ground next to you.

Speaker A Yeah, you, they descended about three or 500, between three and 500ft a minute. So the aircraft was 200 foot above you. About a minute later, you're, you're 30 seconds at your hill. You'll feel it. It gets really windy. And the problem for an aircraft, if you're too close behind that, you can get caught into this, into this. Into this vortex, into this wake turbulence. And it will. It can be range from something really mild to actually something really dangerous. And we, we mitigate it in a lot of ways to prevent it being dangerous. We'll talk about that in a moment. But often you'll be flying along and maybe you're an aircraft might have crossed in front of you five, 10 minutes ago, maybe 1,000 foot above. And you might just get through a little bit of this now. But it's so dissipated that it kind of feels a bit like just a quick rumble, doesn't it? You know, as you go through it for a second, it'd be really smooth.

Speaker B Quick stutter.

Speaker A Yeah, like a sharp kind of stutter. And that's it. It'd be done dusted as you go through this bit of turbulent air. But anyway, I was flying into Athens and Athens, it was super busy going in there. We, There was. We were number. We checked in on approach and we were told we were number 15 in the queue to be vectored. They weren't holding aircraft, strangely. It's really unusual and it's really busy. Normally you'll go to a hold. They were just vectoring people all over the place. And people kept joining the frequency. And the biggest one I heard was. Or the largest Number was number 22. So, yep, you're number 22 for the approach. So we were number 15. We're getting sequenced in and we were told we're following a heavy aircraft. So aircraft are categorized by their level of weight. Turbulence. So typically if my ATPL days go correct, up to 7 tons. If an aircraft weighs up to 7 tons, that's light. A light category between 7 and I think it's 136 tons. It's medium category. And if your aircraft weighs more than 136 tons at max takeoff weight, then it's a heavy. Then it goes into super, which would be like a. A380. And depending on though the. The weight category, there'll be certain separation minima, the certain distance you have to be behind that, which we'll talk about more in a moment. But we were told we're following a heavy, and it turned out it was a triple seven. Now, the minimum separation we need to be behind a heavy is normally five miles. And we could see their TCAs return on our. On our nav display and they were about seven or eight miles away. So we're like, okay, great, we can. We saw them visually. They were on long final. We're kind of coming in on base like 90 degrees and they were on final. They were seven miles ahead. We're like, okay, fine, we'll slow down, keep at least that distance. Great. So fine, we're starting to set up for this approach now. Quite a long way out. About 20 miles out, about to turn onto the extended centerline. FO was flying and all of a sudden the aircraft just rolls about 30, 35 degrees to the right. Autopilot jumps out. So you get the Mack Mac and the aircraft just rolls and obviously it's just out of nowhere. So the FO correctly just brings it back. And it came back as it should have done. Got the autopilot engaged and then within about another second it went the other way. We got about 30, 35 degrees the other way. Autopilot trip down. I took control at that point, brought it back, got it, got it engaged. Re established on the center line, flew the approach. We told air traffic what had happened, but they were about eight miles ahead of us. They were well outside the separation.

Speaker B You see, that's the thing. I mean the, the idea of, of distance separation is great, but it also depends on the wind direction and it depends a lot on hot is the air, is it stable? It can stay up longer or it can start drifting in a way that is not anticipated. And especially if you guys were on a vector, you might actually have hit. If they were on the final and you were vectored in, it could have blown straight towards you.

Speaker A That's right.

Speaker B That's why it's impossible to keep it complete, 100% free.

Speaker A No. And it was, you know, once we've done that, it was back on the approach and everything was fine. But it was probably the worst experience I've had of waked up. I've had quite a few, you know, rough moments, wake turbulence, and you're going to, if you're flying. But that was probably the most eye opening one I've had. It certainly woke you up, let's put it that way.

Speaker B Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the thing. By the way, this is one of the reasons why we have the seatbelt sign on as we're descending in. Because the thing with these things, I know a lot of people are going to be asking, can you see this on the weather? I know you can't because there's no, there's no moisture in these things. It's just air that's moving really, really quickly. So, so you can't see them. You can anticipate them by knowledge, which is what we do. Like Anytime that I'm in Cruise, for example, and you're sitting up there and you see an aircraft that's crossing a thousand feet above you, then I always, I sit and I look. Okay, so how far away is that? When are we going to reach it? And you have these, these trend vectors on your navigation display that shows 30 seconds of a trend, which means that, okay, I can see that I'm for example, a minute and a half away from where they're crossing now. They're 1,000ft above. Let's see, it's descending with 400ft per minute. It's going to be 800ft lower than like 700ft lower. We might actually hit that thing. So if you're ever in an aircraft and it's completely calm and suddenly the seat belt sign goes on like bing. One of two things are true. Like either there is like someone needs to use the toilet or most likely there is a positive potential of wake turbulence. And if you ever, if you see that happening and then it takes about a minute or something and then all of a sudden it just out of nowhere, it's just a shrub of the aircraft, like sudden, violent and it, it feels mechanical. It doesn't feel like normal turbulence, which is kind of soft and movement. This is like, like a, like a giant child grabs onto the aircraft and shakes it Suddenly then than what you've just experienced is us flying through at this part of these vortexes. And something that you can also see, which is really fascinating is if you're sitting parallel and you're flying parallel to an aircraft and you look at the, the contrails, right? So you can see the contrails that goes out behind them. You can actually, if you look, you can see that below the contrail you'll see the wake vortices falling down.

Speaker A You will.

Speaker B It's not actually the contrail itself because that tends to stay more or less at the same altitude, but some of the contrail gets taken up by the vortexes and you can see that it kind of falls down like two little legs sticking out behind the aircraft.

Speaker A That's it.

Speaker B And that's those ones.

Speaker A Yeah. And it's funny, I find something similar coming a little while now, but There was an A380 coming the other direction 1000 foot above us. So we're up in the cruise at 3 7th area. There's this A380 coming the other way. And looked obviously looks incredible when you see this thing a thousand foot above with a. About a thousand mile an hour closer closing speed looks awesome. But I also knew that they have nasty wake turbines.

Speaker B They are nasty.

Speaker A They're horrible. You can see them. You can like you said, in the contrails of those. You can really see the contrails getting pulled down and spread out. So I asked for a vector 45 to the left and they said is that for wake turbine? I said well, yeah, potentially. So yeah, no worries. We turned, but sure enough, about a minute later we still got some pretty nasty wake turbulence even though we were diverging at 45 degrees.

Speaker B So you diverge with or against the wind.

Speaker A I went downwind. Oh, and so, so sorry. Up upwind of the upwind. Yeah.

Speaker B Interesting because. Yeah, I know the 380 you have to have, you have to be very careful with because it has caused a real accident. We had, we had a business jet. That's right. That was flying close to an A 380 that was going down to Australia and they got into the way turbulence and it actually caught it so it, it twisted it around. They rolled several times as they fell down and the, there was some light injuries to the people on board. Like there was no fatal injuries and they managed to divert and land but the aircraft was written off. It was structurally damaged so it could not be used again.

Speaker A Yeah, the risk is real. But just to put a more kind of realistic light on this, the severe stuff is rare. This is, we mitigate this a lot by making sure we have correct separation, being mindful of wind directions and so on. Same for departure as well, rather than distance. Because we're all on the Runway, it will be done in time. So if there's a, say for example, a 747 departing in front of me, we need to wait at least two minutes from them getting airborne before we can, we can begin our takeoff role. And if it's a, there's other. If it's a heavy or a super sorry, it could be three minutes. So we, we mitigate that by giving it time to dissipate.

Speaker B Yeah, and yeah, it's, it's a fascinating thing. It's one of those things that, that I don't think people realize, but it's also part of the, the work that we do. Like when, when a pilot works, we are constantly scanning for potential threats. And I think this is one of the main difference between, for example, someone driving a car from A to B. Now you're driving a car from A to B. You don't like. Obviously you keep track of the traffic around you and you plan where to turn and things like that. But you don't really sit and think, could, you know, is there an elk about to jump out there? What my braking distance? You don't sit and constantly think about how things could potentially go wrong and how you mitigate against it. You just do. But in aviation, that's actually the job. This is why we use automatics so much, because if we can put the automatics in and let the autopilot do a lot of the actual stick and rudder flying, it means that we can dedicate our work on seeing potential threats coming up, mitigating against them, making sure that never becomes dangerous. And it's one of the things that have really increased safety. Funnily enough, since I started now riding motorcycle, which I've just done the last. Basically last few months, I see a lot of similarities because my friends, for example, that I ride with now, riding a motorcycle is all about looking at threats constantly. We ride now in a group of three or four. One of the most experienced is at the front, and one of the most experienced at the back. And then me, typically in the middle, which is less experience. And they will sit and like, okay, there's a car coming up now, or even there's a. There's a motorcycle behind the car. There's a chance that he might try to overtake. Be careful. And constantly briefing for them back like, okay, these. Just beware that there's a little bit of moisture up in the. In the turn coming up, or there's some gravel on the road. Be careful. So we communicate all the time.

Speaker A You got comms, have you?

Speaker B Yeah, yeah. It's.

Speaker A Oh, nice.

Speaker B Everyone have comms in their. In their helmets, which means there's a lot of talking going on.

Speaker A But.

Speaker B But I really recognize that whole thinking about, okay, there's stuff here that might try to. To kill you constantly. So you think about that.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B While in a car, it's not at all like, no.

Speaker A And it is what it is, and the automation enables us to do that. And as a last line of defense, to make sure it doesn't turn horribly nasty, is we train. We train pilots to do what we call upset prevention or recovery training. Uprt. It's a big part of airline training, and it's something where we fly the aircraft and we train pilots in a number of ways. But in the sim, one of the things we'll do is I'll sit as an instructor next to what. Whoever I'm training, and I'll get them to close their eyes, and I go. And I will then try and disorientate them. So I'll move the sim in different ways. And I'll put it into what we call an upset position, as though they maybe have got caught in wake turbulence and it suddenly goes in something very unusual. And I'll put it maybe a steep nose down, steep angle of bank. I'll say, okay, open your eyes and recover. And they've now got to process what the aircraft is doing, and then they'll do a set recovery, depending on whether it's nose high, nose low, high angle of bank, whatever it might be, to make sure. Because the danger when you've got an aircraft in an upset is you can overstress the aircraft. But what I mean by that is by putting too an aggressive kind of control input, you can overstress the aircraft. You can put too much G on the airplane and overstress the wings. And so we need to make sure that we don't overspeed it, we don't underspeed the aircraft, and we don't pull too much G or negative G so that we can smoothly recover out, which is.

Speaker B It's not easy to do, as in easy to train this in a simulator, because one of the things that we cannot. We cannot simulate is G forces.

Speaker A No.

Speaker B So we can simulate certain accelerations and decelerations and turns and feelings, but we cannot simulate a high G force for that. You'd need the simulator to spin in one of those centrifuges.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B So. So what we do as. As instructors is that we. We put them in just like Ben said, put them into this upset, whatever it might be. And then we have a little screen on our right, and it shows the envelope, what you're allowed to do, what the aircraft is allowed to do, and we'll see how they deal with it. And if they pull too much or if they do some. Something that's too abrupt, we'll see that it goes outside of the envelope and we just repeat it. We say, okay, now that was a bit too much pull. And the reason for that, obviously, since if they find themselves in this situation in real life, they are also going to feel the G forces. Right. So it's going to be slightly different. But hopefully by training this over and over and over again, the. The mechanic responds to it. And the. The way that they interpret what they see on the primary flight display is going to be so ingrained.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B That. That they will be able to. They'll remember. They'll hear Ben's voice in the back of their head saying, don't pull that hard when they do it, and it.

Speaker A That helps and it's something don't forget as well. We also do this in light aircraft as an instructor teaching commercial pilots. Years ago we would do. It's much more fun. You're doing a light aircraft as well. So you close your eyes and this time you can pull some G and really get the vestibular system all confused. They'll think their nose high, rolling left. They'll open their eyes and they're actually nose low rolling right. And then they've got to recover. And the technique's the same.

Speaker B And this is something that. Yes, we did. I did some of that when I did my training, but it wasn't really put into as a mandatory thing as an upset prevention and recovery training. UPRT is now you have to do it in. And I think it has to be an aerobatic. Aerobatic kind of Slingsby or something like. Yeah, yeah. One of those aircraft that can take it. I have been invited, actually, to go up and do the course with. With. With some flight schools because they want to highlight the fact that we do this. And I think it's a brilliant idea.

Speaker A It is, yeah.

Speaker B I think I would puke if they would put me into that now. But. But I think it's a great idea that all new beginners, all new pilots that are getting into the profession have actually felt what it's like to be rolled over.

Speaker A And, you know, because G experiencing G is nothing else like it on Earth is that you can't really explain what G is like if you're pulling 4 or 5 or 6, 7 g. It. I. I try and articulate it to my kids. Sometimes I'll be, you know, I've flown. I've been fortunate enough to fly things like extras. The extra 300. No, not the extra. Yeah, the Pit special. Sorry. I'm hopefully flying an extra 300. The hawk hunter and so on. And when you're kind of pulling. The most I've pulled is just under 7G. And there's. It's a very, very strange sensation that everything just feels six or seven times heavier. And it really has an effect on you. It really does. If you've never experienced it before. And the first time you experience this is when you're in an echo. Not that you experience 7G and 7,3. You've got bigger problems if you've got. If you're doing that. But it's something that is good to experience in a training environment. For sure.

Speaker B For sure. For sure. No, but it also goes to show something that we keep talking about on this podcast. And on our videos that the industry is adapting to what they see. So we talked a few episodes back about the fact that they saw that maybe people weren't getting as much exposure to manual handling as they should. Yeah, using the automatics a bit too much. You know, Children of the Magenta line, basically. If you want to go back and listen to that, that's the episode name. But now, like, as a response to that, they came with UPRT as well as part of try to mitigating against and making sure that people do get more stick and rod feeling and get more extreme experiences, real aircraft, but also recurrently in the simulator and going back to wake turbulence.

Speaker A Better. Do you think AI can help us help the industry with a bit of prediction there?

Speaker B You're fishing. You're fishing for my AI skepticism here.

Speaker A I am.

Speaker B So what's happened to me is I've gone from being really, really curious about artificial intelligence. I actually had an AI bot very early on. Several years ago, I had an AI bot in my application Mentor Aviation, which are. Fortunately, we're closing down now because it's just not so many people using the app. But anyway. And I was really curious about it and thinking what it could be. But the more I learn about the AI, the more skeptical I become. I think I see that you have a different opinion and I'm looking forward to this. No, I think that there are going to be areas where AI is going to excel and that is going to be things like pattern recognition, looking for. For, you know, like mammogram scans, looking for breast cancer, looking for. For maybe ways to combine amino acids and proteins and in order to create new medicines and stuff. I do not think that I will ever be able to do anything that requires any type of artist, artistic genius that they will. No.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B No.

Speaker A I don't know.

Speaker B And the reason for that is because of the way that it is. It's a prediction engine. I think there's too many people out there that think that these things are actually intelligent, while in reality what they are is they're trying to predict the next move all the time. And you could argue that maybe that's what we and our brains do as well to a certain extent. But they take. Then AI today takes all what it finds on the Internet, all of the information that is being fed in, and then it tries to use that in order to predict what the next move will be, which means that it will never do anything that's outside of that. Something that no one has ever done before.

Speaker A True. But is that Not. Is that not the case with anything early? Is that not the case with early search engines? Even aviation, you go back to aviation and look at the limits. If you like, look at search engines back in what, I don't know, 2000? Yeah, you type something in, it'll give you garbage, something really spammy. But look how that has developed now and become such an integral part of our world.

Speaker B Yeah, it's becoming worse because of AI.

Speaker A Yeah, but does that mean, though, just because AI now has got hallucinations in it, does that mean that it's always going to be that way? Does it not mean that it's going to continue learning, continue improving?

Speaker B Yeah, it will continue, I think. Yeah, no, no, I think it will continue to be better in certain cases. And I mean, to a certain extent, a search engine engine is pattern recognition. Right. So machine learning would work really well with search because it can figure out, oh, well, you know, Ben, usually it's things like this. So I'm going to be using this. It could be, you know, honed into your particular skills. But what I'm talking about is when you need to be creative, when you need to do something that is interesting. Now, I have a feeling people listen to our podcast because we have personalities, because we will, you know, we will say something that people didn't expect from time to time, and we will share whatever we know. But AI and the way that the large language models work today does not do that. And the reason I'm saying this is not just because I just suddenly became skeptic, it's just because we've been using it to try to find ideation, for example, for coming up with new interesting video concepts or what you know, or put a video title on, or even like suggestion how a thumbnail would be. But every time we do it is consistently worse than if a human does it. A great example is our thumbnails, which I think a lot of people might have recognized now have changed on Mentor Pilot. So we, for a long time we thought about, okay, so how do we. As a content creator, you always want as many people as possible to see what you've done. Right? Has many reasons for that. Obviously, it's a monetary thing. You want to be able to pay for your team and everything. And that's only possible if not enough people watches it. So you always try to find, okay, so how do you do this? If you use AI or if you use the way that AI would do things, all thumbnails would look the same. There would always be shocked faces on it. There will always be red arrows on it. There would always be an emotive word on it. And that's how my thumbnails on Mentor Pilot used to look up until recently when one of our graphic designers, Ben, came and said, listen, no, the brand Mentor Pilot is about being positive. It's about being constructive. It's about teaching, it's about learning. Why don't we do thumbnails that are about that, that still shows that this is a. Like, it's an accident that has real repercussions and it looks dramatic, but we do so within a very defined framework. And when we did that, like, if I were last asked chatgpt a hundred times, it would never have said that because it would only say what it knows is successful from other channels. You should have a bigger red arrow or you should have a more emotive word. But it would never come out and say, you need to change your approach to this because your channel is actually different than what these thumbnails are showing. That's outside of. And before you get to Rebot, what we've seen now is all of a sudden, while we've done this, the back catalog, the old videos that we've done started to come alive. People are starting to watch them because it turns out that that's actually what people wanted to see. They got a little bit pissed off. My core viewers, which are probably listening to this now, they've watched my videos in spite of the thumbnails, not because of the thumbnails. They're like, okay, the thumbnails is something else. But I know that it's going to be Petter and Ben behind those thumbnails saying something. So now when the thumbnails are actually in line with the brand, they are more attractive to the really important ones, the core ones, the core viewers that really appreciate what we do.

Speaker A Well, I'd say two things to that. Firstly, I would say AI is in its infancy. It's very much learning. I'd liken it now to maybe someone that's just starting out in a career. If you look at any of us when we're starting out a career, we make mistakes. We don't come up with brilliant solutions. But what we do is we learn from that. And we apply what we learn so that in three or four or five years, we're so much better. We're the bends of the thumbnail world who can make these incredible things and look at the brief and understand what needs to be done. The way and the rate that AI is learning, I think that can get there. I think you could feed in. And I think the other thing I would say, the second thing I would say is the quality of AI output is very much dependent on the input. I've learned that by getting very particular prompts into AI even at this early stage of its career. As such, you can get vastly different results if you can tell it not to agree with you, not to look at the norm, to become. Do something a bit different. This is the values of the brand. This is what I'm trying to achieve. Feed it as much as you can of what you want it to do. Suddenly it will surprise you. I've found. And I think five years from now, I think AI could be very, very different to where we are now. We'll look back and go, my goodness, it was hopeless back then. A bit like looking back at us when we were starting.

Speaker B True. But I am also, I'm going to stand by this. I think that AI, you're absolutely right, AI is as bad as. As bad now as it's ever going to be. It's only going to get better from here. But I think that what we will find is that over the next year, I would say AI is going to start to be defined into where it's going to be useful. Like it's going to. It's going to be put into stuff where like we here, we would have never been able to do this particular thing. And I think that is within medical science, for example, and search and so on without AI. But I think that anything that has creative in it is just. I think it's not. The reason I say that is because I think it's. It's actually getting worse at these things. It's not going forward. And that is partially because that it's now starting to feed on its own creation. So we're starting like it's using whatever information is out on the Internet to train itself. And now AI is starting to put stuff out on the Internet.

Speaker A But don't we do that too?

Speaker B But we go forward in leaps because of someone doing the complete opposite of what people expect, like the Picassos of the world. No one would have thought that Picasso style of painting would be something that we would like to look at because it looks weird, right? But then someone comes out and think completely differently, way outside of the norm, and it changes the way that. That humanity moves. But AI can never, by its very own way that is written, can never do that because it always feeds on its own. It feeds on what's already happened.

Speaker A I think that's the AI. Now, I think the way, looking at what AI is aiming towards, I think it can get this autonomous creativity.

Speaker B You think that is going towards general intelligence?

Speaker A Yeah, I think so. I think that it can potentially get to the point where it's much more autonomous and can come up with new, you know, it's already coming with new ideas, isn't it? In various, in various.

Speaker B It's not, it's not coming with any new ideas, it's just coming with variations of the same ideas. But what you're talking about is general, general intelligence. And, and to answer your question that you came with is that the day that AI actually has general intelligence, as in when it has surpassed into the realm of coming up with new and, and novel ideas, not just being, being like redactive, just creating what all of this is, then I think that AI will be, will be flying the aircraft as well. Then our job, basically none of the jobs that exist today would be needed. Right. So, so we will have AIs flying the aircraft then, providing that it can be be hosted inside of the aircraft, obviously. And that doesn't need to have some kind of uplink. But, but, but up until that point we're talking about large language models and the machine learning that we're seeing right now. There's no way that it will be able to do it.

Speaker A No. And I think, but I think the future, the worrying thing for a lot of us is that the general intelligence future is a possibility, is a possible outcome.

Speaker B Yes. But I'm going to say that it's like this is a little bit of my private war at the moment, because I think that we are just like we were, remember back in, in around the year 2000 where everyone thought that everything is going to be on the Internet. And then it turned out not to be the case, at least not for another two decades or at least a decade and a half. And the whole stock market crashed into one of the biggest recessions that we've ever seen. I think that's where we are with AI now. I think everyone in humanity thinks that AI is going to be able to do everything. I think that the big companies out there are probably are projecting huge savings with the help of AI. That is just not realistic. With the type of technology that we have right now. We are not going to be able to do what AI are promising. And when people realize that, which I think is going to happen within the next year, I think we're going to see one mother of a stock market crash.

Speaker A Yeah, the stock market, I Think there's lots of talks about that, but I think if the amount of money that's being pumped into AI at the moment, from all the big hitters, they're deep into this now, they're committing to this. And I think when you start pumping that amount of money into something and it is developing, it is learning, the potentials there are potentially are huge, without a doubt.

Speaker B But I think that the thing now is that when. And by the way, this is not investment advice in any way, shape or form, if you're listening to this. This is just us speculating here wildly. We have no, no way of doing that. But if you look at the way that stock market reacts to an investment in AI, now, basically anyone who says that we are investing in AI will get an increase on their stock price, right? So the more you pump into it, the more people are expecting it to return. But at some point, the AI need to start delivering as well. Like at some point you're going to need to start seeing that these airlines are actually airlines, that these companies are actually reaping the benefits of all of these billions that they're pumping in. And so far, very little.

Speaker A They've got a mind, I think they've got an eye on the longer game. I think if you look at imagine aviation back in the early 19, 1905, 1910, there's a potential there, people investing money. But just because a few planes crashed and it wasn't working for a long period of time, if people walked away, it wouldn't have been a thing. But they kept with it, they kept pumping money, they kept developing and it kept getting better and better and better. And now look where we are. I think that's potentially where aviation, where AI could potentially go. It might not be a quick thing, but I think long term, I think it's here to stay.

Speaker B Even for creation, you'd be listening to an AI podcast?

Speaker A No, for that. No, I don't think that. I'm not saying it's going to take over everything. I think the more that AI comes into the world, the more people are going to want genuine human interaction and human content, for sure.

Speaker B That's what I think as well. This is what I was getting at, that AI at least. I mean, you know, if it would be general intelligence, then yes, I might listen to an AI podcast then. If they actually decided to use our language, that is. But. But the way that the large language models work and the way that I've seen them work when I've been working with them is just not. It's it's not impressive when it comes to coming up with novel ideas and how to present things.

Speaker A No, I don't think we're there's certainly nowhere near it yet, but I think the future I can certainly envision a future where it is it's gonna be.

Speaker B Interesting to sit back now in a and see. Yeah, cool. Listen, we're up to 55 minutes. Let's take a few questions from the audience, shall we?

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B Okay. Let's see. We have Spiros has been sending questions here. Apparently there's been loads of questions been sent out, which I'm really happy to hear because that's how we kind of feed into the ideas of what we want to talk about on this podcast. So continue sending in. What was the email address again that people were supposed to sell?

Speaker A Send this to me captainsntorpilot.com I think.

Speaker B There was Captains enterpilot.com Thank you. Okay, let's see. Hi Petra and Ben, Loving your podcast. Oh, I have a question for Peter. Peter, whilst you are on your break from flying, are you doing anything to keep your license type rating current? For example, sim sessions, if not, if you wish to return to flying at some point or what do you have to do in order to be current again? Thank you from Claire. Yeah, so at the moment I have not done anything. I have spent the last two years completely outside of the cockpit, which I am really starting to feel now. And I've been, I am in contact with an ato. There's an aviation training organization that is willing to help me to start putting it together. At this point, when I've been away for two years, I need to do some theoretic lessons first of all. And then I need to do a training session in the SIM and a license proficiency check with an examiner. So I am planning to do that hopefully within the next few months, certainly within the next half years. Then in order for me to go back flying as a captain, I am going to need to do some serious amount of training. So I'm going to go out with the line training captain. So first get my licenses back active, my typewriting back active. Then I need to go out with a training captain. I need to fly together with that training captain for a few sectors at least in order to to kind of get back into the saddle again. And only once that has been done and they have then decided that they think that I'm good enough. I've done some line checks and stuff with someone like Ben, then I would be able to come back but the longer I wait, the longer the road back is, there's no question about that. And I feel it like I wouldn't mind going in for example, into the right seat as a first officer for a while actually to kind of warm things back up again before going back to the left. And I think that's, it's a super important quality to have to know your limitations and know that you're not that shit hot. Like I have the theoretical knowledge. Absolutely. But the practical knowledge needs to be maintained and I haven't. So I would need to do some, some serious work to get back on.

Speaker A I think it's something we all felt during COVID when we weren't flying. When you, when you take that break away, it does take a bit of time to get that, that capacity back while you're flying, the raw skills you often keep. But it, you lose that capacity.

Speaker B And it's a lot of that, that, that like when you're flying constantly like you are now, Ben, there's a lot of the decision making that goes on, the processes that goes on in the process background in your head, almost subconsciously you're thinking about things. But as soon as you take a break and you come back, all of those need to be active processes. And when you have to do take all of those active processes and actually think of oh well, what should I be doing now? What's that scan flow? How does it sound like you know, then that takes up a lot of your capacity so that you have less of the spare capacity needed in order to, to have a good overview of situations. So automatically your situational awareness becomes smaller.

Speaker A Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right.

Speaker B Right, let's see another question then. Hi, Petra and Ben, could you go over various minor emergencies from a passenger point of view? What does a tail strike, bird strike, engine flame out, decompression and a lot more feel from, from a passenger perspective. Thanks and regards from Ian Millington in the uk.

Speaker A It's a good question. I think it depends on the failure. I think a lot of them will be completely transparent to the passengers. There'll be a lot of scenarios where if I think of all the different stuff that I've had over the years, probably a lot of them, the passengers had no ide until we had to either divert or do something.

Speaker B Yeah. So, but, but it's interesting like there are certain things like bird strike in the engine, for example, you might notice.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B If you, if you suddenly start smelling like a bad version of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the, in the, in the cabin, well then You've ingested a bird in the right hand engine on a 737, we, we get that smell first if we do the same in the left hand engine because of the way that the air conditioning system is built, decompression is obvious. Yeah. You know, if that happens, you will see the, the, the masks dropping down. You'll see the cabin crew act in a specific way. You need to get your mask on first and then help any others and, and things like that. And then you'll feel the aircraft what you would perceive as a violently starting to descend, what is in reality a controlled but rapid descent from the front. And the reason for that is the, your, your oxygen generators that you have on top of your, of your seats, they're only active about 13, 14 minutes or so. So if we would stay at altitude and you would, you would then breathe oxygen for 13, 40 minutes, but then that would stop and you would still be in the same situation. So we need to get down, we need to get down to around 10, 000ft in order for everyone to be able to breathe without any type of problem. Now, our masks are different. We have, we have oxygen cylinders that, that goes for much longer than that depending on how many people are in the cockpit. But. Yeah, but that's another thing that you will notice then is that you'll, you'll smell a smell of burning.

Speaker A Yes.

Speaker B The oxygen generators, when they start working, they will be hot, really hot, and they're going to start burning up, especially the, the dust that settles on them. So like a decompression is probably, if you're afraid of flying, it's not going to be a pleasant experience. It's going to be probably a bang, a hiss, your ears might pop, the things will fall down. So you get what we call the rubber jungle in the, in the cabin, the aircraft will pitch forward, start descending and at the same time you will smell like burning. So it's like there's a lot of really bad things that will happen at once there. But all of it is within the realms of what we train for.

Speaker A It is, yeah. And I think one we're seeing, I see a, quite a, I see more on social media a few more times than maybe recently are things like engine surges where they've hit a bird. And you'll see it looks really dramatic and it sounds really dramatic where an engine will suddenly start popping and banging. So you'll see a bit like a Lamborghini downshifting, but not as fun, you know, where all suddenly you see flames Coming out the back, you know, bang, bang, bang, bang out of the back of the engine. And if you're in the cabin, you're going to see like this fire coming out. So it looks really dramatic, but effectively, as soon as you shut the engine down, it all just stops.

Speaker B Yeah, exactly. Or even. Even sometimes you can just pull it back a little bit. Yeah, back a little bit. So. Absolutely. So there are a couple of things that you will, you will notice, but most of the things that Ben says, if there's something that has to do with our engines but we don't have to shut them down, you won't notice it. If we do have to shut them down, it's unlikely that you will notice it, at least in the beginning.

Speaker A The aim is to. Not that you don't notice it.

Speaker B No. Because an engine failure in itself, you will. You probably won't even hear it. You might notice if you really listen for it, but who does? If you think about it, when we start descending, we put the engines back to idle and you notice that, but not much. And you wouldn't think that's strange. So a lot of the things is going to be transparent. You're going to hear about it when we make a PA telling you about it or when the cabin crew starts preparing you for something.

Speaker A Correct.

Speaker B Right. Hello, Captains Daniel here. In some entropilot videos, you have mentioned test pilots. Can you elaborate more on them? What kind of trainings did they have to follow? Keep up the fantastic work. Cheers. So test pilots is actually the specific training course to become a test pilot. And it's very advanced from what I've heard. I can't remember the length now, but obviously you have to have a certain amount of experience as a normal pilot, or normally they tend to come from the Air Force, the test pilots, and then they go through this course where they basically just learn how to go through a rigorous testing program of an aircraft. What they're supposed to do, how they're supposed to evaluate the way that the aircraft responds to certain maneuvers and making sure that it keeps within certain criteria. It's very, very formal. It's nothing like going out and just like, ah, let's see what this girl can do now.

Speaker A No, it's a dangerous. It's one of the most risky elements of aviation because you're pushing the aircraft to its absolute limits, often beyond that, and then trying to get it back in within its controlled envelope. So it's a dangerous. It's a dangerous element of it. And people have died, unfortunately, doing it. But it's a very demanding course from what I understand. They still use Hawker Hunters, what I understand as well in the military in the UK anyway. But yeah, it's very rigorous, very precise. Everything's very much specified as to what they're going to do. You need a great knowledge of aerodynamics, practical aerodynamics. So it's a lot of theory too.

Speaker B Yeah, because sometimes they're not, I mean, yes, they're, they're pushing the aircraft outside of its limits in order to. Basically the manuals that we have will set up like, okay, this is how much you're allowed to do. This is the max demonstrated crosswind, for example. These are, it's built on what these test pilots have done to a certain extent. They've gone out and they've tested it like, well, now we can't really maintain Runway heading anymore. So this, this is too much. And then they reduce it down to what us normal deadly mortal pilots can do. But it's also, like you said, there's a lot of aerodynamics and there's a lot of. It's a different type of thinking, I think. And this is where Boeing had had some issues in the past around for example, MCAS and stuff, where the, the test pilots reacted in one way.

Speaker A Yes.

Speaker B Right. So the test pilots were like, okay, you, you, you find that this happens to you, the stabilizer starts running away or whatever and then they react in a way that a test pilot would react. But in reality when this is being shown to normal pilots, they don't react neither as fast or in the same exact way as a test pilot might do. So it's tricky, it's very tricky to certify new aircraft because it reminds me.

Speaker A I've done a very little bit of post maintenance test flying in light aircraft and it reminds me in a similar way to airshow flying in that air. The air shows kind of look like you're just going up there and honing an airplane around, having fun for 20 minutes. But everything's obviously super documented and prescripted as to what you're going to do. Very much the same with that. You'll get airborne, you've got to climb at a certain airspeed, you've got to deploy a certain degree of flap, you've got a note rate of climb changes every, every 30 seconds and so on. So there's a lot, it's very, very prescriptive as to what you do.

Speaker B Yeah, absolutely. But that's a great question. Neither one of yours has done that course, so we can't really go into specifics, but we have the greatest respect for our test pilot colleagues. And we're up to an hour and five minutes now, so I think that's all of the questions. Continue sending in your questions. We might either respond to them like we did here, or we might create an entire episode around them. So keep. Keep sending them in because they are. They are really great.

Speaker A Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, big. Also, big shout out to me to Marcus, ops manager at Carlsruhe. Thank you for looking after us. Absolute gentleman and awesome.

Speaker B I think with that, Ben, have a really nice continuation of the day, and I'm gonna go and get some cake.

Speaker A Thank you. Enjoy the day. Happy birthday, and we'll see you next week.

Speaker B Thank you. See you next week.

Speaker A Take care. Bye.

Is Wake Turbulence More Dangerous Than You Think? (Audio-Only Version)

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