Scariest Take Off I've Ever Seen - Aircraft Performance and Personal Minimums

I recently saw this footage for the first time and it scared the shit out of me. It's actually about four years old and it went viral in the aviation community back then and I wondered how could I have missed this and then it hit me. it was because I had one of these at the time so I was a little distracted from flying but after things calmed down in my life I got back into it in a lot of ways, watching this video really inspired me to think about my

personal

minimums

adding a margin to Weather minima is kind of obvious, but it's also very important to think about margins with

performance

calculations, so Chris Palmer from Angle of Attack was kind enough to share this footage with me so I could relive it and give it a higher spin.

The basic twist is that it is a high-

performance

airplane, a turbo bonanza. I think it took off from a very short runway surrounded by trees at a high density altitude. Chris does an incredible job breaking down exactly what's going on here, so I'm not going to go into that. kind of details, but I'll provide links that you have to check out for now. What I want to just do is see it and react so clearly that Chris knows that he's facing a little bit of a challenge when he starts this

take

off run, but he knows. your plane and you did your calculations and you know the numbers say it can be done but the question is will it be done so after the rotation here you are committed and you can see that things are not going as planned so you could have been closer. just stand back and look at this, look at those treetops, I mean the wingtips are definitely under them, so it just screeched through that gap, managed to instinctively turn a little to the left to find that gap that he had and he went through it and fought the urge to back away, which I think a lot of people would have done and then crashed into those trees, so congratulations for flying right on the edge, man, he got it out, but just as soon as the article appeared from Chris where If you break it down, you'll see a lot of Monday morning quarterbacks in the thread, so I think there's a saying that goes something like experience is a difficult teacher because she gives the test first and the lesson Afterwards, and all aviation lessons are unsurvivable, so the moral of the story here is that just because the performance calculations say you can do it, doesn't mean you will be able to do it.

I mean, you need to fly the plane perfectly, you need ideal conditions that match the conditions exactly. It's supposed to be on the lists, so the reality is that most of the planes we fly today are over ten years old and you know, unless you're a multi-millionaire pilot, you're not going to fly perfectly, so the odds of that you do it exactly as the book says are extremely low and Chris is a very experienced pilot and again does an incredible job breaking down

ever

ything that happened here so I won't go into details but at the end of the day with a margin so I

personal

ly think I've always approximated 50%, but I'm going to say officially at this point that I will add a 50% margin to the performance numbers for my personal

minimums

for any

take

off calculations I do. in the future so I'm just a private pilot doing my best to stay updated and learn.

I will make these videos for self-analysis purposes. In this case, Chris was kind enough to share his footage and definitely check out Chris' links. I'll put them in the description and on the screen here. I'll make some clickable annotations, but yeah, check out his stuff. He has an amazing aviatorcast, so for more virtual travel and flight videos, subscribe. I'm doing my best to upload a video about once a week and continue keep your flying skills sharp wher

ever

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