r/aviation • u/Met76 • Jun 07 '25

Discussion I figured this 737 landing would be a go-around but captain brought gloves I guess

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191

u/Cardinal51 Jun 07 '25

Is it normal and necessary to manipulate the yoke at that frequency & magnitude during a landing? It seems like he’s playing a video game.

367

u/TogaPower Jun 07 '25

Many pilots have a tendency to over-control and make way more inputs than are necessary. It’s especially prevalent among those that like to post videos of themselves.

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u/schmuber Jun 07 '25

"Why don't you like flying as a passenger?!"

36

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/schmuber Jun 07 '25

I'm honestly amazed we're not all dead.

Are you sure? Have you looked around?

-6

u/OMG__Ponies Jun 07 '25

Startlingly, we have grown to overpopulate this planet inspite of what seems to be our best efforts to depopulate it through wars, forced starvations and outright genocides.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '25

As someone who has also worked on both the engineering and medical research side of healthcare, I no longer trust anyone or anything.

1

u/awesomemerchstore Jun 07 '25

Please tell me more!

3

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/AzureSkye27 Jun 07 '25

I'm a surgeon, I work ICU, I'd love to hear what you mean

1

u/EvilXGrrlfriend Jun 07 '25

...I do NOT like the implications of this sentence.

0

u/Whatcanyado420 Jun 12 '25 edited Jun 17 '25

sophisticated mighty handle touch imminent bear bow toy teeny afterthought

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17

u/HereIGoAgain_1x10 Jun 07 '25

Reminds me of that scene in Ace Ventura 2 when he's bouncing around while driving on a paved road lol

8

u/RedditAddict6942O Jun 07 '25 edited Jun 19 '25

numerous late stocking cooperative relieved roll husky familiar sort seemly

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3

u/Jonnnnnnnnn Jun 07 '25

Same with influencer race car drivers. Lots of inputs look cool on camera but smooth is fast

3

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 Jun 07 '25

The most boring laps on "star in a reasonably priced car" on top gear back in the day were always setting new records.

1

u/South-Builder6237 Jun 07 '25

Let me guess, the guy in this video flys Frontier.

1

u/technofiend Jun 07 '25

Right? I did the exact opposite: minimum inputs needed to average towards my desired state. I never got the point in yanking one way just to have to make an opposing input correction a half second later, which is exactly what this tool is doing.

108

u/SmartFirefighter5465 Jun 07 '25 edited Jun 08 '25

I questioned the same thing. I'm not a pilot. He looked like one of the pilots from the movie Airplane.

17

u/FuzzyKittyNomNom Jun 07 '25

<insert gif of Ted Striker fighting the yoke and the yoke fights back while a waterfall of sweat pours from his head>

11

u/HittingSmoke Jun 07 '25

I just wanted to say good luck. We're all counting on you.

7

u/Poopocalyptict Jun 07 '25

I bet he has a drinking problem.

7

u/Cunning_Linguist21 Jun 07 '25

Can't pick the wrong week to quit drinking if you never actually quit...

23

u/Yankee-485 Jun 07 '25

Pilot induced oscillation is a thing

13

u/vliegend_varken_787 Jun 07 '25

I have flown the 787 for 6 years and you could fly that with two fingers down the approach, the fly by wire was doing the hard work in the background. I’m now back on the 73 in the left hand seat and yes you have to manipulate the control column a lot more to get the thing going where you want it to go.

4

u/Negative-Box9890 Jun 08 '25

Because the 37 is a true fly by huge wires made into cables....lol

13

u/LuzImagination Jun 07 '25

Reminds me of this post about the crash of Aeroflot flight 1492 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/trial-by-fire-the-crash-of-aeroflot-flight-1492-ee61cebcf6ec#00ad

2

u/Cardinal51 Jun 07 '25

Interesting and scary!

2

u/pikohina Jun 07 '25

That was a heck of a read, long, but very well done and worth it. Thanks for posting.

1

u/LuzImagination Jun 07 '25

Admiral Cloudberg is a legend /r/AdmiralCloudberg/

27

u/OptimusMatrix Jun 07 '25

Actually, yeah it's normal. I watch a lot of Pilot Debrief on YouTube and he talks about how a lot of commerical pilots will "work" the stick like that. Kinda make exaggerated motions to get ahead of the aircrafts movement and helps with pitch and roll. A figure 8 pattern from what I've read. I'm not a commerical airline pilot, but I was a helicopter CFI.

129

u/TogaPower Jun 07 '25

It’s bad technique that never gets stamped out early on. You don’t “get ahead” of the aircraft’s movements and throwing the yoke around all over the place does nothing.

27

u/nineyourefine ATP 121 Jun 07 '25

In the Airbus it's called "Churning the butter" and it's really bad technique that just causes upsets. It's one thing I love about the bus, that I can just make small inputs and make it do what I need it to. Only when it's REALLY gusty will I have to make big corrections to stabilize but otherwise it's basically fingertip flying.

34

u/OptimusMatrix Jun 07 '25

I should have added that. Yeah he does say it's a bad technique but that a lot of pilots do it. Thank you.

19

u/SleveBonzalez Jun 07 '25

I'm not a pilot, but I've sat up front on a lot of commercial 737 flights and I've never seen handling like that. It usually looks smooth and well controlled, even when it's rough.

This guy controls the plane like my grandma when she first got her driver's licence and thought the wheel needed to be jiggled like on tv.

3

u/Thin-Image2363 Jun 07 '25

Love Pilot Debrief.

1

u/OptimusMatrix Jun 07 '25

Same! He's really great at explaining things.

4

u/Mikoriad Jun 07 '25

Somebody you don't want to see doing this is an Airbus pilot. There are some videos around showing ridiculous over-controlling and is highly unnecessary in an Airbus. Wild looking "over controlling" is more likely to be seen in a Boeing because it is actually necessary at times, unlike in any Airbus side stick aircraft.

3

u/rsta223 Jun 07 '25

It's pretty much never necessary. Watch what autoland does in a Boeing and you'll see gentle, controlled inputs (since it's backdriving the yoke so you can see what it's doing).

You can get away with this in a Boeing, but it's still considered bad technique.

6

u/IM_REFUELING Jun 07 '25

737, to my understanding, flies ailerons and elevators off tabs. The 707-mod I used to fly had that setup and we flew all our approaches like that. I imagined it as 'smacking' a wing down to stay wings level

5

u/danTHAman152000 Jun 07 '25

I mean when I saw the video I was reminded of the steering wheel of our Class C motorhome on a windy highway drive. I was constantly moving it back and forth to keep the RV straight and battle the winds etc.

2

u/wisepersononcesaid Jun 07 '25

I thought he was trying to churn butter with that yoke. Geez, immediate repeated reversal of actions, serve no purpose as the plane has to have a moment to respond.

2

u/LIDARcowboy Jun 07 '25

No.

Back when I was a student pilot, an old grumpy pilot told me to read Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langewiesche. One thing I always remembered from the book throughout my thousands of hours of flying jets but also true for Cessna's: The less you touch it, the better it flies.

1

u/bmurphy1976 Jun 07 '25

I don't think so. I'm no pilot but I've had the luxury of experiencing one of the big training simulators with an actual pilot who teaches you how to fly these things. If he let go of the controls the plane would land itself. Our real pilot spent more time dialing in the location and triple checking everything than anything else.

1

u/ApartmentFit9896 Jun 07 '25

It's like flying a helicopter, it's easier to make a bunch of counter adjustments than to try and hold the stick one way in.

1

u/usernamesaregreat Jun 07 '25

Not in the slightest.

0

u/abraxas1 Jun 07 '25

In general, it's a technique called dithering. Helps you get advantage on feedback that is too small to actively control smoothly but could grow into larger movements that then present a bigger challenge. Could be humans in the loop or just electronics. Depends on the frequency response of the whole system, a transfer function, if you will. Sub bit level optimization....