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Step Inside the YouTube Cockpit Cam Library of Babel

Pilots are awesome. Flying is awesome.
Image: SuperJet International/Flickr

My first foray into the endless aisles of cockpit POV footage began a couple of weeks ago with a viral video of an extreme crosswind landing, which had been suggested by Facebook's newsfeed algorithm. YouTube, where I actually watched the video, subsequently invited me to view a similar event from a cockpit perspective and, well, I accepted the offer. I then accepted an offer to ride along on a commercial flight out of Zurich featuring an engine failure. The pilots were a couple of cool cucumbers and it wound up being not a big deal.

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After that, it was an electrical failure during a student pilot's first ever solo night flight. Again: a cool cucumber, even with a rattled passenger shining a flashlight on the instrument panel, and even as the runway lights shut off moments before touchdown, leaving the cucumber and us, his spectators, to land in what looks an awful lot like an eternal black void.

I'm a fan of the FlightChops channel, which is a series of really well-done instructional-ish videos put together by a recreational pilot in Toronto. He's not weird or an idiot and has a cucumbery way of walking us through the events of sometimes sketchy cockpit-perspective flights. Many are his own flying footage, but a few (like the above) are narrations of videos submitted by other pilots. I'd recommend this channel for the flying-afraid because he's really got a soothing way of explaining this stuff. Here's two more:

Whoa:

Around this point things take a darker turn. YouTube's recommendations eventually led me to the video below, which is posted by user "overclockedHD" with pretty much no context. We're left to assume the worst here and I think that's probably the point. This same channel consists of mostly ghoulish disaster videos—crashes with titles that begin with MUST SEE and feature people dying horribly. It's the worst kind of clickmill, exploiting tragedy and compulsive bystander curiosity in the name of, presumably, money.

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To be clear, I'm interested mostly in pilots, not crashes. There's a fluidity of mind that makes me think of, dunno, sword-fighting or ballet. Here's a good example below. Apparently, there are only five pilots in the world certified to fly into this airport. The geography makes it impossible for them to rely on instruments in any way, requiring fully visual and "by feel" operations.

JustPlanes seems to be a generally good channel. Its content is more from the perspective of commercial airliner pilots, which you start to see is a bit of a different dance. There are just as many videos that aren't crises at all and consist just of pilots being pilots in situations that, to us, seem completely bonkers. Two more from JustPlanes:

Awesome! Fantastic!

That's the thing: It is awesome and fantastic. Flying is maybe the most fantastic and awesome thing we do as techno-humans. And, arguably, it's only now with basically unlimited footage of it taking place that we can truly appreciate it. That said, I really need to take a second flying lesson already.