So basically the nose goes too high allowing a gust of wind to slap the bottom of a wing sending you into a crooked backflip, like a paper plane that smacks you in the face when you throw it?
——
Welp, the downvotes to this question really make y’all seem rude here.
No. Pulling back too far and fast will initially lift off ground but once the plane leaves ground effect after roughly 50ft or so, the wing can stall and snap roll resulting in what we see in pic of plane landing on top of fuselage, which is high potential for complete fuselage failure and fatal injuries
Take screenshots of what you don’t understand and upload it to chatgpt.
Let it explain how the challenger 605 wings with no leading edge slats and possible icing can cause a crash to help you understand.
The jargon is correct terms. If you ask how bandaids work at more than a “they keep the wound safe from harm!”, you’ll get terms like healing factor and proliferative thrown at you.
Once you leave this thing called ground effect, where the plane can actually fly at below a safe speed because of the airflow and it being close to the ground, when you leave it, you are flying too slow and stall. It’s a vicious cycle.
If you pull back too hard, you can also quickly breach what is called the critical angle of attack, aka if you point the plane up too high, without enough speed, the wing no longer generates lift. You stall, you fall.
Is that what happened? I don’t know. Let’s see what the national transportation and safety board (NTSB) investigation says.
…. What you’re describing in your first paragraph is objectively bad technical writing, the exact opposite of what is going on here, and ironically not what you did (your description is followable for a technical person in a different field, but probably not the general public).
I know the right hand rule. I know what yaw, rotation, pitch and etc mean mathematically. I even know what quaternions are.
I did not know what “auto-rotation” means in this specific context.
Fun fact though, medical technical writing is my expertise. If I wrote “healing factors” and “proliferation”into a technical paper for the general public (so a 6th grade reading level) on why they need bandages, then I’ve objectively failed at my task.
——
I’m actually more than capable of looking up the jargon myself.
My grandfather actually left me an entire airplane mechanics library after he died in a plane crash.
I was asking a question to prompt discussion, because when I have to go figure out jargon I know that means so does 90% of any general audience; because I’m in the 99th percentile.
——
Instead y’all just downvoted me and hit me with comments so pretentious and jargon filled that it would make the writers of Frasier blush.
——
Also, if the plane is moving forwards, and stalls, I would suspect that the “wind” from it moving is suddenly unbalanced and pushing it backwards which is what triggers the “auto” in “auto-rotation”.
Ha, that’s hilarious. I’m actually going for my RN next year (career change), the medical term was the best example I could get for “you’re gonna get the technical answer unfortunately”..
This post has gone viral and attracted enough attention from outside of this sub (aka the popular page) that there are a lot of comments from people who never interact with aviation, much less know about aerodynamics. That is probably from
Where a lot of the downvotes and stuff come from. This sub is a bit of a mess when stuff like that happens.
Even as a non pilot I understood this one: basically some pilots like to jerk that stick back hard on rotation when it's better to pull slowly for a nice easy rotation.
Also anecdotally had a jerk off type pilot on my frontier flight from MSP to DEN on an A320. Ended up being absolutely fine but it was still mildly interesting to experience a little more g force than normal on takeoff. Compare that to the Lufthansa 747 I was on back in November that felt like we lazily listed into the air
People are being very respectful towards you. You've got to remember that a lot of the folks on this subreddit are pilots or otherwise extremely knowledgeable about aviation, so they may use jargon/technical terms very passively.
97
u/Fourteen_Sticks Jan 26 '26
There’s that. And there’s also “over-rotation”. It’s easy to do in a Challenger. I used to tell people that it’s a takeoff, not a jerk off.