Moment Pilot Facing 'Sudden Roll' From Wake Turbulence Lands Plane

A pilot has talked Newsweek through a video of an attempt to stabilize an aircraft in a rare "sudden roll" event during a landing in Greece.

The clip has has amazed users on TikTok after it was shared by @frogblastduncain, who did not reveal their name. But they have been a pilot on Boeing's 737 aircraft for eight years, working for "a major airline from Amsterdam in the Netherlands," the poster told Newsweek.

A message overlaid on the video, which amassed 70,000 views after it was shared on May 15, reads: "Watch as we encounter wake turbulence from an A320 NEO [Airbus aircraft]."

The pilot told Newsweek: "Every airplane produces turbulence which we call wake turbulence. This is caused by the wings of the aircraft producing lift."

The incident took place on a Boeing 737-800 aircraft while landing a flight from Amsterdam to Athens, the Greek capital, which the pilot was operating as the first officer along with the captain.

"Athens is a busy airport and we were shortly behind an Airbus A320 [aircraft] from easyJet," the pilot said.

The footage shows a view from inside the cockpit, as the pilot navigates the controls to steer the plane, which wobbles in a "sudden roll movement" as it approaches the runway.

"As a pilot I can feel it happening in the controls before you see it in the video. I felt I had enough control to counteract the rolling moment and managed to make a safe landing. If at any point I didn't feel happy with the controls, I could have always made a go around—aborted landing—and try again. In this case that wasn't necessary," the pilot noted.

The poster explained: "In the video, you can see the sudden roll movement of the aircraft because wake turbulence rolls around itself and tries to roll the aircraft too.

"Events like this happen sometimes but are quite rare. We are also trained for these events," the pilot added.

If the recent plane landing video has left you with a fear of flying, you're definitely not alone. In a June 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology, a fear of flying was found to be prevalent among around 10 to 40 percent of people in the industrialized world.

It comes as no surprise that many may be more nervous about air travel than ever before following recent incidents of severe turbulence, such as on a Singapore Airlines flight that killed a man and injured dozens of other passengers.

Wake Turbulence Can Affect the Safety of a Flight

Pilot @frogblastduncain told Newsweek: "Wake turbulence develops at the tips of the wings and rolls down and away from the aircraft. The strength of the turbulence is affected by wing shape and weight of the aircraft."

Depending on their maximum weight, aircraft fall into either the light, medium, heavy or super category. Airbus' A380, the world's largest passenger aircraft, is the heaviest one and the only one classified in the super category, the pilot said.

The pilot explained: "There are certain rules for air traffic controllers and pilots about how close they can follow a certain category of airplane on landing and also take-off because wake turbulence can indeed be a factor to the safety of the flight."

For example, the Boeing 737-800 is a medium type aircraft. This means that "during take-off, if a heavy category airplane takes off before us, we have to wait two minutes before we are allowed to go. This time ensures the wake turbulence to dissipate and 'roll' away from our take-off track," the pilot said.

The plane in the aforementioned video was following a medium type aircraft. During landing, the separation between the two plane is typically created by distance but now also by time under new European Union laws, the poster noted. "But in this case the minimum distance we had to follow was 2.5 nautical miles—4.6 kilometers."

The pilot said: "We were exactly 2.5 miles behind the landing aircraft. The conditions that day meant the wake turbulence didn't get blown away by the wind because at the time the wind was very calm. So, sometimes the wake turbulence lingers a bit above the runway."

'Nice Job'

Users on TikTok were impressed by the plane landing in the recent clip.

Cahyyam said "Beautiful landing!" and bk4ever noted "nice job, good training."

John Edwards said "great recovery" while Danno wrote "wow, nice reaction."

John said it was "nicely handled at the end..."

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