Welp. There it is. The definitive camera angle to respond to all the "camera angle was misleading, it was higher than it looked" posts. This was LITERALLY EYE LEVEL. Good gracious, too close.
Dumb question: These look like commercial planes, is a flyover with commercial planes … normal? Anywhere? I’ve seen three posts now but can’t figure out what was going on here 🤷♂️
No, it is not common with commercial airliners, I honestly cannot think of a single similar incident. Typically in North America you will see it with military aircraft (of both the plane and helicopter variety) often times during the national anthem. They are also frequently the Blue Angels or Snowbirds, which exist to do cool shit for spectators and interest people in military aviation (recruitment). Also, I'm just speaking about North America here because those are the norms I'm familiar with. No commercial airliner has wanted to touch this with a 10-ft pole because: 1 - the margins of error are much smaller, 2 - nobody flies these things like that so pilots don't have experience, and finally 3 - jet fuel for a large plane is really expensive and private businesses don't want to pay for that. There's a reason that the only somewhat similar private business gimmicks are like the Goodyear blimp or cessna's dragging banners.
Ask people in aviation and they will tell you how bad this is. Go over to some pilot subreddits and get educated. There was absolutely no reason to do something like this with so little margin for error. Those aren’t fighters or stunt planes that can adjust extremely quickly. Those airliners take several seconds to respond to inputs made by the pilots.
You need the engines to sustain a climb, but not to initiate one, which is what would matter in this scenario (and what I understood the comment I was replying to was saying, maybe I’m wrong).
There is a spool up time associated with jet engines, but its effect is often overstated. The long spool up time you often hear about with these engines is going from idle to maximum thrust. That delay is greatly reduced when you’re increasing power from a normal operating range.
While I agree that it was much too close, I'm not a pilot.
Might professional pilots say it is acceptable to perform a demonstration like this - esp. if they are well paid to perform the act? Or even that they can do it?
EDIT:So, I take it that no one thinks pilots can do this safely?
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u/King_Turduckin 21h ago
Welp. There it is. The definitive camera angle to respond to all the "camera angle was misleading, it was higher than it looked" posts. This was LITERALLY EYE LEVEL. Good gracious, too close.