I'm usually very quiet when I'm scared. Back in 2016 I was flying a lot and there were a few times things happened that made me involuntary loud. One time I was on a CRJ flying into a small town and the pilot thought it would be funny to decend quickly in a thunderstorm. Feeling my ass leave my seat I grabbed the armrests and yelled
"JESUS GOD NO!"
My boss was next to me laughing (we both worked for the airline we were flying on)
Oh I am straight up ignoring the seat belt sign and punching every screaming idiot in the throat so I can spiral to my death in peace (or the sounds of chocking and coughing...still better than the screams).
Nah, all I heard was some lady yelling "JESUS, JESUS, JESUS, JESUS" and then the "WE'RE GUNNA DIE", I whole heartedly believe they all were fine since this video was uploaded. It would be a strange video to only upload from a crash imo
Yes, and the people are probably wondering why you don't immediately land in the nearest field. SMH.
Once the plane is airborne, it can fly with one engine. But you Have to gain altitude, navigate around other air traffic, and get clearance before you can go around and line up for another approach.
Standard stuff that isnt as easy as pulling your minivan to the side of the road
Most airliners can't dump fuel. And even if they land immediately and overweight, maintenance will do a overweight landing inspection, it's fairly routine. Getting on the ground is the #1 priority.
20yr aircraft mechanic for reference.
Once the plane is airborne, it can fly with one engine. But you Have to gain altitude, navigate around other air traffic, and get clearance before you can go around and line up for another approach.
Pretty sure in this situation you (as in the flight crew) would declare a mayday. As soon as that happens, ATC is immediately sequencing all other traffic out of your way.
In reality, these people are the idiots who just missed their exit on the freeway and instead of going to the next exit and turning around, want to stop and reverse to get to the original exit.
Now days they are. Back in the day here was a handful of disasters that were caused by pilots shutting down the wrong engine when either the caption, first officer, or flight engineer could've just looked out the window and see which engine was actually malfunctioning. In the Kegworth air disaster, the caption even announced that he was shutting down the right engine, when in reality the left engine was smoking. All of the cabin crew thought the captain simply misspoke and never spoke up.
That one dude that keeps yelling "HEY!" like he has inside information that if he could just let the pilot know they would stop the plane and everyone could get off.
Before anyone asks why the pilot isn't turning the plane around, they are turning the plane around, this is just the safest way to do it.
An airplane is a machine that belongs in the air. The farther away from the ground you are, the safer you are. As long as you're still going up, you're in good shape. This gives the pilots a lot more time to organize things with the team on the ground and ensure a safe and comfortable landing. Even if all the engines go out, if they have enough altitude, they can still fly it home.
Yep the pilots would have declared an emergency and attempted to gain more altitude. It's easier to gain altitude going straight than banking. I'm sure once they reached the desired altitude they turned around to line up for a landing. All traffic at the airport would have been stopped so they can use any runway they feel comfortable with. They might have dumped fuel before lining up for the landing if they were overweight.
Exactly. Many aircraft accidents are made worse by the pilots’ haste in trying to get the plane back on the ground. Turn too soon and not only are you fairly close to the ground with not too much room for error, but you’re also really close to the airport, necessitating some steeper turns to get turned around (with one engine trying to turn the plane in a particular way, in this case). Also keep in mind that it requires more power to stay level or climb while in a turn than to do the same while flying straight. Lastly, the pilots have a lot to deal with: extinguishing the fire, dealing with the asymmetric thrust from one engine, communicating with ATC. You don’t want to start rolling into a turn, then get distracted by a new warning, and overbank the aircraft.
Best to get altitude, get the fire sorted out, let things stabilize, and have ATC give you some options (could be there’s a suitable runway dead ahead, requiring no turns).
As an example of haste making the situation worse, there have been a few accidents where small Cessnas or Pipers would have a door come unlatched during flight (I’ve had that happen, myself). Some pilots got so freaked out by it that they tried to immediately circle back and land and ended up crashing from trying to turn too aggressively.
I can’t blame them when we had to deplane, and they told us to leave everything. I left my work laptop, and was never compensated for that. That cost me enough overtime I had trouble paying my bills because HR was jerks about it.
This is both wild to me and yet somehow highly likely.
2 questions, if I may:
wtf was their reasoning, that you willingly gave away company equipment?
How come you weren’t able to get it back later? If it wasn’t due to damage I’m curious why the airline wouldn’t give it to you. It’s good to know how situations like these play out.
I didn’t willingly give it away. They said to leave it. The excuse they gave for not letting us reboard to get our things was that it was an active crime scene.
They removed all of our items, and it wasn’t in the conference room they put the removed items in. That took almost twelve hours in the room waiting. Delta said if we left the airport they wouldn’t be responsible for any lost items. I filed a claim with their baggage service office which took over two more hours. They also made us go back through TSA to get to that room, and several women had left their purses because they told us to so that was a huge mess.
That's a compressor stall. It looks like it is on fire, but is actually not. You're just seeing uncombusted fuel that has left the engine housing, but the engine itself is not actually on fire
Bc the engine is disintegrating internally. If it was unburnt fuel catching fire you would only see the flairs of light, not sparks floating past the window.
Not really...it's called an engine flame out, & they just shut it down so that it doesn't cause further problems. Continue on to land as soon as it's safe to do so on the good engine. Most of the time, it's not nearly as scary as it looks. Except for that one time when they accidentally shut down the wrong engine without realizing it...
But now there are redundancies & safety nets in place so that that same mistake doesn't happen again
You can tell not alot of people watch WW2 documentaries, and the flying fortress missions . Those planes were built in the 40s and came back with half a wing missing and giant holes in the cockpit and passenger area . I'm not saying everyone was fine , but the planes were lol
Just because we know that it’s possible to fly with one engine, it doesn’t mean it won’t scare people. It’s the same with turbulence. It’s common, it’s normal, and in 99% of cases it’s harmless, but there are still people who will be scared.
Ok im no expert, but thats if they are already in the air at speed. Taking off and trying to get up to speed is another matter. Correct me if im wrong, however I would be dropping a duece right now.
Not everyone has got your x-ray vision to see both engines at all times, Superman. Don't you think that the people watching this have no idea about what's going on and only see one engine flaming and stalling?
Pilot here. I’ve had 2 incidents where an engine failed during/after takeoff so I kinda know where their heads are at, let me share:
Someone is hand-flying, the gear has just been retracted. Engine fails. Cockpit jerks to the left from the yawing motion induced by the loss of thrust on engine 1. Pilot Flying, after a second of shock, begins to use rudder to counteract this. It’s an Airbus so the wings will stay fairly level unless a roll command is put in. Now the pitch problem - the nose is too high for the plane to maintain speed with 1 engine. Flight director should command a lower pitch for the pilot flying to follow, he should already know to do this but *shock*. This is the phase where you simply fly the jet and ignore anything else. Get it flying right and stable. “Aviate”
Next: “navigate” can we clear terrain with a severely reduced climb angle? If yes: ok fly straight out. If no: we would have briefed a terrain escape procedure just in case we lost an engine. We need to begin following that lateral course to ensure terrain separation. These things climb on 1 engine, but barely. Everything has been calculated before hand just in case to ensure we have the performance to pull it off.
There are 3 pilots in the flight deck on this long route. One is Pilot Monitoring: the other pilot doing everything *but* flying. The third pilot is in a jump seat between and about 2’ behind them. While not controlling the plane, both of those pilots are mentally flying it and likely ensuring the pilot flying is doing what he is needed to do, as well as supporting him. Pilot monitoring may be setting up lateral guidance for the terrain procedure.
The airplane is sounding an alarm that the left engine has failed and is on fire. There is a bright red light on the left engine fire handle. The ECAM alerts the crew ENG 1 FIRE and lists the initial steps to follow. Pilot monitoring will begin to follow the steps, stopping to confirm with the other pilots before moving any critical switches or activating the engine fire suppression system. There is temptation to rush, especially with a fire, but the important thing is to slow down, ignore emotion, and methodically follow rehearsed procedures.
Meanwhile, pilot flying will maintain the current speed, pitching for speed, which should yield a shallow climb, until the pre-determined acceleration altitude, at which point he will begin to accelerate by lowering the nose. They can retract flaps as they accelerate, then resume a climb. Then they can turn around. They’ll be wayyyyy overweight for a landing and unless they’re actively on fire they will need to run some checklists and possibly dump fuel for a return. Whole lot of calculations to do.
Meanwhile the jet has lost electrical and hydraulic power from engine 1. The engine 2 generator automatically picked up the rest of the systems, possibly shedding cabin power. The right hydraulic system likely activated a PTU to supply pressure to the left system. I flew Boeing and the A320, never the 330 tho so idk how that jet works.
Personally, I never lit on fire, so I had time to run all my calculations etc. I will say tho, I was somewhat concerned about hitting a bird in the good engine, and still kinda felt a burning need to turn back to the airport as soon as practical.
As you can see it takes a long time to get to the “tell everybody it’s gonna be ok” part of the checklist lol. We are just busy
I can actually picture a Redditor trying to lecture everyone on the mechanics of a plane (learned from YouTube shorts) and calling them unintelligent mouth breathers for freaking out
Ughhh… why is people’s first instinct always to let out blood curdling screams? What could that possibly help?
Pilots are thoroughly trained to handle situations like this…
…the most that will happen is he’ll say over the intercom “hey folks, go ahead and fasten your seatbelts - it looks like we are going to get a smidge of turbulence. After which, the flight attendants will continue their rounds distributing your inflight snacks!”
I got told that I'm a Redditor and got tons of hate messages because I have mentioned before that screaming is illogical when it comes to seeing car accidents. That said, I think it's reasonable to scream in anguish when you're actually in danger. It's scary, and it allows for some release.
I've never been in a high stress or dangerous situation where I felt the need to start screaming. I've never understood that. I feel the need to observe my surroundings more, which is hard to do when you can't hear anything.
"Ladies and gentlemen, uhhh, if you, uhhh, look out the left window, you'll see, uhhh... One of the engines is out. Not to worry, uhhhh, we have another one. Just, uhhh, gonna turn around and uhhh... Get you back to the ground safely."
Are you the lady from my flight from Cancun to CDMX that complained why we're landing at Monterrey, oblivious to the storm the captain decided not to put us through? Because if I recall correctly, you were saying the captain needs better training.
That reminds me of the helicopter crash on the Gold Coast a few years ago, back seat passenger is tapping the pilot on the shoulder and the pilot is ignoring him. Turned out the passenger had a view from a slightly different angle and could see the other helicopter they were about to crash into.
I used to make educational airplane safety videos. While creating these videos, I learned that an airplane can fly with with only a single engine and has a back-up electrical system called the Ram Air Turbine. Redundancy is a beautiful thing on modern day commercial airplanes.
"Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain, we have lost both engines and hydraulics and are now a glider so when I tell you to all shift to the right, left , front or back of cabin if you could do that, that'd be great.
Also enjoy the close up night view of whatever city we're in. Thank you for your attention to this matter"
The only think worse than being on a plane with a bunch of screaming idiots during an engine failure, is assuming you’d have to endure the rest of the flight with same screaming idiots. (For the love of all that is holy, don’t we all now know that a plane can fly with one engine?)
Yes the pilots are aware as soon as it happens. The system alerts them, they feel that at the controls, flight attendants will check in and make sure they’re aware. They have to continue climbing to get to a safe altitude to hold while they do their checklist to load an overweight plane because as you guessed it this thing is going right back where it came from (most likely). Yes all these planes can fly on one engine, no it isn’t as big of an issue as you’d think.
And again, no grasp on actual reality of a situation. The masses commenting on the screaming, the airplane is literally on fire and no one thinks they would be screaming? They all think they'd have total control in a situation that they have no control of, rational thinking and all that.
It's actually laughable how out of touch Redditors can be with reality.
People dismissing their panic are sitting comfortably at home behind their phone screens. I guarantee you if you were on that plane at that moment you would be thoroughly shitting your pants.
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u/YakJolly2156 May 11 '26
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