Mayday Aircraft Asked to Hold

"Mayday mayday mayday." "Are you declaring an emergency?" "Is this your first day as an ATC?"

Kelsey recording this video after being kidnapped and held in an abandoned warehouse? Blink three times if you need us to send the A-Team

As an ARFF Firefighter (Airport Rescue & Fire Fighting) I can tell you a controllers main reason for asking for fuel load in a none low fuel emergency is for us. Our truck carry between 1500 and 3000 gallons of water. We can convert to foam via a foam concentrate we mix into the water. The more fuel you have the more foam we will need if your fuel tanks rupture. We use foam even in the absence of fire because it floats in the leaking fuel and keeps it from being able to ignite. Us knowing how much fuel is onboard gives us that heads up to calculate if we have enough resources. Hours of fuel does not tell us the actual volume because we don’t know the aircraft consumption rate. We have ti have it in pounds or gallons for our calculations. Food for thought for pilots who give it in hours.

Task saturation kills pilots. As a fellow long haul captain, this conversation needs to happen, in earnest much more often. Keep it coming brother.

14:44 "That may not be procedure, but neither is hitting the mountain." 😂 My kind of humor

From VASAviation’s videos I’ve learned that if pilots say fuel in pounds they get asked for time, and if they give it in time they get asked for pounds, and if they give it in both they get asked for it in pints.

In the mid 80s my father was flying alone for the DEA in the middle of the night on the way home from a mission when a piston ejected through the hood. He was told to stand by after declaring mayday multiple times until he eventually crash landed in a field. Never was able to communicate with tower. He survived but was knocked unconscious, seat belt caught so hard he had to get stitches in his chest. He was a legend!

Many years ago we lost an outboard engine on takeoff from Lajes field, Azores. We were in a KC130 bagged out with 65 thousand pounds of fuel. Once we’d shut down the engine and started to dump fuel and barely having positive rate of climb, we declared Mayday and came around to land but were directed to extend our down wind for a P-3 that was in the pattern doing touch and goes. Got to love it.

We must appreciate that Kelsey left his nice hotel and brought all of his recording equipment and stood in an abandoned building just to tell us about this!

From the European ATC perspective I don't agree with what You said about fuel. If we ask for "fuel on board", we want the kilograms or tonnes. The only purpose of that information is to pass it to the firefighters. Since it is you, who have the emergency, we don't need to know how long CAN You fly. We want to know how long you WANT to fly. If you need immediate return, you will get it. If you need 10 minutes for the checklist, you will get it. If you need 2 hour for fuel burning You will get it. If we need to know how long you can fly there's an other word in phreseology: "endurance". "Report endurance" - the answer must be in minutes/hours. And we rarely would use that in an emergency. It happens in "weather situations. Or in our unit's case - with military traffic, which has diffrent fuel regulations. They come back to land with much lower endurance remaining than commercial planes.

"You might have to let the engine burn, which isn't part of procedure...but neither is hitting the mountain"....LMAO you always unintentionally crack me up @74 Gear!

Hi, Im a 787 Captain and my son is an Air Traffic Controller and a commercial pilot. First, I too am very much a stickler for standard ICAO phraseology on the radio. ICAO phraseology needs more emphasis during instrument training. We frequently have discussions of pilot vs controller issues. When he's at work, he is always called over when an aircraft declares an emergency to give information about what the emergency aircraft might need or be doing. It shocks me that the controller in this situation did not immediately realize the significance of the Mayday call. Kudos to the crew for using the correct Mayday call. on the other hand, Im amazed at the number of aircrews that do not declare an emergency when they should. As far as thrust reversers, I believe it was a Lauda Air 767, 30 some odd years ago, that had a reverser actually deploy inflight. The crew lost control of the aircraft very quickly and crashed.

"That may not be procedure, but neither is hitting the mountain" 🤣🤣🤣..Kelsey ,I love you!!!

"The universal distress call Mayday was invented in 1923 by Frederick Stanley Mockford, chief radio officer at Croydon airport in London. The authorities had asked him to find a term to signal distress that would be easily understood by all pilots and ground staff in the event of an emergency. Mockford chose a phonetic transcription of the pronunciation of the French expression "m'aider" - ‘help me’ (a shortened version of "venez m'aider") which had been uttered by a French pilot in distress two years earlier and which was understood by the English operator as "Mayday". And Pan Pan is from the French 'Panne' (Breakdown)

Kelsey deserves a fifth stripe. Addresses serious matters with an outrageous tongue in cheek humour. As he says (twice) "I'm just a big cry baby". Who tosses around 747's like they are feathers. 74Gear rules!

I’m an older controller at a level 12 facility and this is all great info, I’ve learned a lot from your channel. A lot of the weird questions and misunderstandings you may hear from us nowadays is a product of the FAA’s recent hiring of people with NO previous aviation experience. However, also bear in mind that there IS a lot going on behind the scenes for us too. Internal coordination between sectors and/or the tower, calling the domestic event network, moving other aircraft out of your way, rolling the equipment, dealing with stupid supervisors mouth breathing over our shoulder asking dumb questions, etc. So we may or may not have operational bandwidth to be able to give progressive instructions either, depending on workload. When they pull the tapes on these incidents they usually tell the computer to filter out all the other transmissions to declutter, so who knows what else was going on. Love your stuff, keep up the good work!

As a controller I always assumed holding wasn’t that hard to do for a pilot. Seems like a good idea to have them hold close to the field so they can be ready to come in when they’re ready. I think the majority of controllers that don’t have piloting experience think this way until we see stuff like this explaining it. My initial thought was that giving the hold instructions would’ve been easier because now they’re in one spot near the field and no longer expecting any more radio calls for more control instructions while they troubleshoot and configure. I’ll keep this video in mind if I’m in the scenario in the future but truly I (and a lot of us) didn’t/don’t know how much workload it increases. As you said though the pilot should’ve said unable to his hold instructions if it increases the workload that much. Not all of us know how to fly a plane and how much goes into certain tasks and we just want to help lol Ps. Super embarrassing that a pilot said mayday, mayday, mayday and the controller asked if he was declaring an emergency 🤦🏼‍♂️

Most simulator scenarios at my airline have us do a hold after an engine failure on departure followed by a return to the airport. But hey, that's the sim... we understand the game and play along. In reality, I would certainly refuse any hold given, and request vectors. When we changed from "declaring an emergency" to PAN-PAN-PAN I was like "how am I going to remember calling PAN in an emergency after years of training with "declaring an emergency"? Couple years later we had to shut down an engine at 1500ft after departure, and to my surprise I did call PAN-PAN-PAN !! I asked for 15-20 min vectors to get ourselves ready to come back SE, that's what we got no problem, ATC was super helpful. Once on final the controller asked us to "keep the speed up". My answer was "Negative". He immediately apologized and said "Speed at you discretion".

14:41 "That may not be procedure... but neither is hitting the mountain" Lol!! I love these explanations expressed in such a straightforward way

Totally agree with the 2.2 issue. As a retired controller/supervisor phraseology has been written in blood. Stick to the pilot-controller glossary and recommended phraseology. What does the controller think "Mayday, mayday, mayday" mean other than an emergency? Controller giving an alt and heading is perfect, then all the pilot to aviate, navigate, then get to you. Also once the pilot gives SOB and fuel remaining in time (if they give lbs take it, let pilot fly) coordinate all the subsequent controllers know and won't ask again. So, as a controller, and 10,000+ corporate pilot you nailed this, not surprised. I feel any engine failure (for 2 engined aircraft), keeping the aircraft sort of close to the airport just in case of the other engine buggering up. Weather issuance was good, totally agree. I'd have asked the pilot if they wanted vectors or holding, and if holding where they'd like to hold. And if holding at the controllers discretion, issue easy holding...give a point and ask the pilot how they'd like to hold. The PILOT is the BOSS. Controllers are not very well versed on aircraft fly, or even emergencies aside from how to handle them, so keep that in mind.