Over the past three years, Kevin Ray has streamed hundreds of airplane takeoffs and landings for his nearly 800,000 YouTube subscribers.
There’s not much that can shock him.
‘Wow! Wow! We’re getting a restart. Holy moly,” Ray said Tuesday afternoon.
Ray was at LAX Airport when he witnessed a Lufthansa Airlines Boeing 747-8, which can carry up to 400 passengers and crew, attempting to land. The plane hit the runway hard and then bounced forward before the pilot rejected the landing and booked it back into the air.
“It almost looked like it was going to hit the front and when you see things like that it’s concerning,” he said. “That’s the roughest landing we’ve ever seen on our deployment.”
Although it looked rough and dramatic, two aviation experts said it was not dangerous.
“It was horrible to land a real clunker, but there’s nothing dangerous about it because those planes were built for it,” said retired pilot Barry Schiff.
Captain Laura Einsetler flies similar widebody aircraft in and out of LAX.
“It’s possible it was a higher, faster approach to the airport, and we can’t say how far down the runway they landed, so it could have been a contributing factor,” she said.
Einsetler explained that a landing rejection and a go-around are among the many skills pilots can use on every landing.
“Every now and then you see a non-routine operation like a difficult landing,” Schiff said. “The pilot has been recovered and there are procedures in place to do that.
The flight eventually made a smooth landing, but the initial rejection left an impression on Ray.
“I’ll probably never see anything like that again, and that’s okay,” he said.
Lesley Marin
