10 ms·

I don't know a whole lot about skydiving or piloting (nothing in fact), but to each of your points: > gave up too early You and a couple other commenters ment

• arlcode 5y ago
  You want to pull the cord a few seconds after exiting. 1...2...3...pull. Freefall is not the goal when bailing in case of an emergency.
  • coryfklein 5y ago
    Unless you're a skydiver by trade in an emergency situation and you fall back on what is familiar to you? Let's say instead they did pull the chute immediately after bailing and then used the extra altitude to sail back to safety. Would you be more inclined to believe the stunt was real?
  • polack 5y ago
    Especially in a case like this when you need to hike your way out. Then why not pull ASAP and then fly back towards civilization and look for the best possible landing spot. You can also see much better landing spots when he's hanging in the shoot that he could easily make. So why the hell did he end up in a bush like that? And why go look for the plane? Like just focus on getting to safety. Nothing in this video makes sense.
    • arlcode 5y ago
      > And why go look for the plane? You would attempt to go back to civilization ASAP...Unless you'd need to, for example, reenable the magnetos/fuel switch in order to avoid "embarrassing" questions from the authorities.
      • gambiting 5y ago
        I mean, if you were far from civilization, it's probably best to wait for rescue next to the crashed plane, no? Much easier to spot from the air.
        • behringer 5y ago
          From the video it doesn't even look like he called atc. But to answer your question, yes. He would tell atc where he's going and where he can be found.
        • ashtonkem 5y ago
          The thing about engine out situations is that it's not that hard to get to civilization before you bail out. These light aircraft glide great, he should have been able to ditch (or land) closer to a town or road.
      • gpm 5y ago
        Are these switches really robust enough that "flipped during crash" isn't a likely explanation you could give to the authorities? Needing to return to the crash site to destroy the evidence feels like a very forced narrative to me (though I know nothing about flying).
        • arlcode 5y ago
          some are. The mixture nob for example could easily survive this especially in a slow splane like this. But I agree it's not the strongest argument
      • tzs 5y ago
• chrononaut 5y ago
  > Wasn't it mounted on the plane dash, and he took it with him when he bailed? I had the exact same thought. If you look at 3m53s in the video, he has both a camera in his hand and the other GoPro remains on the dash. > Is this because he is already a skydiver and/or was going paragliding (is this the same rig? Another thing I don't know). Would it make sense that this is just "what he has," as opposed to owning both a bail out and a sky diving kit? Another set of comments discuss that traditionally pilots who might consider using a parachute generally bring a different type of parachute on board, and not one that would be used by normal skydivers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29730298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29730298
  • shortstuffsushi 5y ago
    > 3m53s Hmm, I see what you're saying - is that a second camera or a mount though? https://imgur.com/a/REa64jn https://imgur.com/a/REa64jn
    • kayfox 5y ago
      Its a GoPro Fusion 360° we never see any video from.
• lumost 5y ago
  Generally planes are good gliders. The only reason to bail out is if it is impossible to find an airport/landing strip within glide range and the aircraft is in a remote location where the aircraft crashing won’t matter. Even in the latter case - there is limited benefit from jumping early vs. gliding towards civilization/possible landing sites. IIRC dealing with engine out/glide contingencies is part of pilot training and licensing in the US EDIT: the commenters on the FA also point out several distinct troubleshooting steps that are missing from the video including pre-engine failure signs + recovery steps, radioing ATC for guidance, flying above roads to ensure proximity to off field landing sites, and maintaining an updated list of off field landing sites along the route. At the very least, several flying mistakes were demonstrated.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • haney 5y ago
    > IIRC dealing with engine out/glide contingencies is part of pilot training and licensing in the US Recently got my Private Pilot License, emergency descents and planning for emergency landings is definitely part of the check ride.
    • NikolaNovak 5y ago
      And early, way earlier than I expected as a student. In my flight club at least they taught you engine failure explicitly early on, then practiced it frequently throughout rest of the lessons and training. I. E. My instructor would literally pull out throttle during a different planned exercise which was my signal for "oh crap I guess we are doing engine fail sim now" :-D There are very very very few situations where I'd imagine trusting my parachuting skills over my Cessna gliding skills. That thing is meant to protect you all the way down.
    • tomcam 5y ago
      Congratulations on the pilot’s license!
    • avereveard 5y ago
• emilburzo 5y ago
  > You and a couple other commenters mention this and not trying to land. Do we know how long it was before he gave up? It's true that there might be video cuts, but just visually guesstimating, there's very little altitude difference between when the propeller stops and when he jumps. > Is this because he is already a skydiver and/or was going paragliding (is this the same rig? Another thing I don't know). Would it make sense that this is just "what he has," as opposed to owning both a bail out and a sky diving kit? Paragliding gear is even more bulkier than a skydiving rig, there's various types depending on the flying you want to do, but here's a typical example: https://qefimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/303/2018/04/sergey-pakhomov-517698-unsplash-768x432.jpg https://qefimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/303/2018/0... Even if he is a skydiver and pilot, you want to use the right tool for the job - skydiving rig: larger, main handle is out of sight, has more snag points, built to stop you from terminal velocity (~120mph/200km) so the opening distance is higher - emergency parachute: small, usually just one handle which you can see and very hard to snag on anything, meant to be opened in under 3s after jumping, definitely not for terminal velocity kind of speeds > Wasn't it mounted on the plane dash, and he took it with him when he bailed? I re-watched the video now and you're right, it's a selfie stick in his hand, as he moves the camera from one hand to the other. Another "unlikely things a pilot does in an emergency" from my side then. > What is the norm for this? My thinking was this was to distance himself from the plane, which he later mentioned "came back around him" after he pulled. This ties in to the parachute type mostly, for rescue situations with emergency parachutes you want to pull ASAP, as the plane will usually fly away anyway (excepting maybe spins, but then it's pretty hard to exit anyway)
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > Another "unlikely things a pilot does in an emergency" from my side then. Well, these youtubers are strange people. It doesn’t strike me as that odd he’d consider his fame before his safety.
    • Sebb767 5y ago
      The alternative scenario is also that he crashed a plane just for views; grabbing video gear is rather sane in comparison.
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
• akiselev 5y ago
  > I understand landing on a small road would be possible in a plane like this, but since he's over mountains (3rd disclaimer, I don't know this area) - is it likely there would be roads available to him? Comments in the article point out several viable landing spots are visible in the video including a (seemingly huge) dry river bed you can see just after the 5 minute mark. I'm not a pilot (working on it) but my understanding is that most crash landing fatalities occur when the plane clips something like a fence or a power line because they couldn't see it on the approach or they miscalculated the glide angle. This causes the plane to suddenly pitch down and fall like a rock but the stall speed for a 1940s Taylorcraft is around 40 mph so as long as the pilot avoids obstacles, they can touch down and quickly dump enough kinetic energy so that the final impact is more like a slow speed auto collision on a residential street (minus airbags). The plane will be totaled, but the pilot will probably survive. It's even possible to land up a hill [1] but that area is relatively rocky so I don't know how safe that would be Edit: Forgot to add, with 40mph stall speed you only really need about a football field worth of space to safely land without totaling the plane, with a decent safety margin to boot. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvKdfa8CoBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvKdfa8CoBw
  • bjornsing 5y ago
    I’d say it’s understandable though that he prefers to jump. The risk of personal injury is probably much lower that way. Still many reasons to doubt that there even was an engine failure, but that’s a separate question.
    • bcrosby95 5y ago
      I'm not a pilot so I have no clue what is or isn't understandable. But based upon what other pilots are saying, it appears to not be a reasonable reaction in this case. Beyond that, if you're flying an airplane, I think you have some responsibility to not jump out at the first sign of trouble.
      • userbinator 5y ago
        Beyond that, if you're flying an airplane, I think you have some responsibility to not jump out at the first sign of trouble. As the saying goes, "The captain goes down with the ship."
• stymaar 5y ago
  Casual skydiver with no piloting experience here. > > skydiving rig > Is this because he is already a skydiver and/or was going paragliding (is this the same rig? Another thing I don't know). Would it make sense that this is just "what he has," as opposed to owning both a bail out and a sky diving kit? Not really. Those are really different material, with really different design constraints. Skydiving parachutes open slowly so they aren't a good fit for an emergency situation because if you have to leave the plane too low, you're pretty much dead, and as long as your plane is still high in the sky, I guess there's little reason to leave it… > > long/stable freefall > What is the norm for this? My thinking was this was to distance himself from the plane, which he later mentioned "came back around him" after he pulled. AFAIK safety parachute don't open well at high fall speed (unlike skydiving ones) so you want to open it quickly and not enjoy your freefall.
  • hindsightbias 5y ago
    Jumping in that terrain with a safety parachute would be pretty dangerous. You don't have any control, so just as well crash the plane in a flat spot.
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    Skydiving rigs are also big which make them annoying to fly with. You can tell early on in the video that he's basically on top of the yoke, which would be extremely obnoxious for obvious ergonomic reasons. The idea that someone would "always" fly like that (as the pilot claims) is ... dubious. Also, there are other videos of this guy flying without that rig, which doesn't help his case.
• kortilla 5y ago
  Unless he was in Alaska, there are always roads relatively close by from a gliding perspective. For more perspective, in the mainland US, the furthest you can get from a McDonald’s, let alone a rode, is 107 miles as the crow flies. A Cessna can glide 9000 feet per 1000 feet altitude loss so at 10k feet that thing can go roughly 17 miles. A 17 mile radius gives you 900 square miles to find a place to land. Even deep in the Rockies wilderness areas I’m familiar with, there are going to be several forest service roads available and plenty of natural clearings with that kind of range.
• base698 5y ago
  Skydiver and pilot here. A skydiving rig can't be used for paragliding. Also a skydiving rig is incredibly uncomfortable worn as pilot of the plane. Pilots use emergency parachutes that are smaller and designed to be used sitting in an airplane seat. Pilot rigs are used primarily for aerobatics. The most suspect thing is jumping with a selfie stick.
  • ehsankia 5y ago
    It's already established that he's a Youtuber and has cameras, why would you not take all your cameras with you when jumping out of the plane? Not even for the cool factor, a gopro costs like over $500, why would you not take it with you?
    • Syonyk 5y ago
      Because if it were an actual emergency, survival is your main priority, "great footage of it" isn't a priority at all. And: (1) GoPros are a lot cheaper than $500. (2) GoPros are a lot cheaper than any flyable airplane. Of course, I wouldn't fly in a plane with a pilot who had and used a selfie stick in flight, so my judgement clearly isn't up to that of YouTube Famous Stars.
      • ehsankia 5y ago
        (1) GoPro Hero10 has MSRP of 500$ (2) He (supposedly) couldn't save the plane, but taking the GoPro takes 5s. > used a selfie stick in flight Everyone keeps talking about selfie stick, it was just the normal leg attachment, not a "selfie stick": https://i.imgur.com/hOkcxOa.png https://i.imgur.com/hOkcxOa.png > "great footage of it" isn't a priority at all. Where is this "Great footage"? He's literally just holding the camera by the leg attachment. Half the falling footage is just his feet or chest, and that's already the heavily trimmed version, which I assume he only kept the better part of the footage. Again, to me it just seems like he grabbed whatever he could quickly and jumped out, which is a natural instinct.
• topspin 5y ago
  > Do we know how long it was before he gave up? We don't need to know this. We can clearly see ample altitude at the time he abandoned the plane. Although there are reasons to jump at great altitude (severe fire, etc.) none of those reasons are apparent here. When a competent driver loses engine power while driving they do not immediately stop their vehicle in the middle of the road. They will use the available momentum (pulling to the shoulder or whatever) for the benefit of their own safety and the safety of others, and ground vehicles are deliberately designed to achieve this. The analogy for (conventional, fixed wing) aircraft is altitude; this pilot wasted available altitude for no discernable reason despite the fact that he had a perfectly functional glider. No competent pilot would do that. So the best case here is an incompetent pilot that shouldn't hold a license. All other possibilities are some form of attention seeking fraud and also reckless endangerment.
  • sundvor 5y ago
    Look at 3:33 into the video, about where he's about to ditch it. It's easy to identify the Y shaped delta of the mountain ridges just 2 clicks north of the Manzana School Camp, with the plane travelling westwards. 34.8081872, -119.9438522. Given the near service ceiling altitude the dude had plenty of opportunity to double back to eg 34.7683290, -120.1101663 . Not exactly sure how much gliding range it has, but can go to just over 60km/h before stalling, and can't be radically different from a Cessna which will do "1.5 nautical miles per 1,000 feet of altitude above ground level". The landing gear appears made for grass fields. Of course, one might speculate, given lack of in-plane footage and everything else, he could also not have throttled the airplane and landed it normally instead of pulling this pathetic stunt. Ie it appears reasonable to assume that the entire thing is a complete fabrication. Who carries a hip altimeter (a few frames of 4:03) and full parachute when flying, as well as covering every angle of the "emergency departure" with GoPros, not a single frame of the "emergency" instruments despite another GoPro in full view, freefalls for ages instead of taking their time to assess etc, then avoids several flat spots including flat riverbeds that were a great alternative to doubling back if completely panicking on basic arithmetics, only to land in dangerous bushes instead "for the views". And then complains of being so so thirsty whilst carrying the whole chute around in his "life and death" situation. Look at the YouTube history, the guy's pathological prankster. Lots of camping sites and such in the area, just look at the coords in your favourite map provider. It was reckless beyond belief. Should I not be wrong with my analysis (having spent a few hours reviewing this), I hope he goes to prison for a very long time.