Mayday Aircraft Asked to Hold

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.

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

I've just notice you have your 4th stripe on your Epaulets, congratulations Captain....

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!

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

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.

His first emergency call was perfect - 3x Mayday, Returning to airport. Lost an engine Tells the controller everything

I am an Emergency Physician who loves the channel. So many of the things you point out about communication, task load reduction, teamwork, safety all have direct correlations to the resuscitation bay in a medical emergency or trauma. Thanks for making your stories accessible to those of us with no aviation background!

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

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

“That’s not procedure, but neither is hitting a mountain.” I laughed out loud. :)

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!

"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)

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!

When I got my PPL here in the UK back in 1985 there was separate training and exam, and a separate licence, for operating an aviation radio. We were taught that there is a standard sequence for the information in a MAYDAY call: MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY callsign and aircraft type Reason ("engine failure") Intention ("returning to airfield") Position (may not be needed when under radar control) Level Heading Squawking (7700 or whatever) We had to memorise this because when the fan gets splattered - especially if you only have one fan - you don't have time to look it up! I've always been puzzled by hearing "declaring an emergency" on this and other aviation channels - MAYDAY is the international distress signal and gets the ATC's attention (although apparently not in this case!) even if the controller's native language isn't English. As for MAYDAY being the "new version" - it was introduced in 1923 according to Alexa 🙂

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

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.

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 🤦🏼‍♂️

Great commentary on passengers hearing engine shutdown. I was on a commercial flight which lost an engine (felt like the fan was going to rip through the fuselage when it went out). Seemed like 5 minutes or more before the Captain made an announcement. I already knew they were busy 1)assessing the situation and 2)going through checklists. We landed at an alternate airport after 30 minutes of flying with 1 engine and praying it didn’t burn out from overload. Always professional, courteous, and I believe the crew was relieved to be safely on terra firma as well. Thanks as always for the commentary.

Mayday comes from the French M'aider meaning 'help me' . PAN also comes from the French word Panne meaning breakdown. So when you call Mayday, you want help to go somewhere, like right now. When you call PAN, you're saying 'I have a breakdown, and give me some space to sort it out; don't need immediate assistance for now'. The level of urgency is lower with a PAN, because you don't have to proceed somewhere immediately.