#362 - Navy Pilot Breaks Down New MH370 Search, Ghost Planes & Surviving 9/11 | Captain Steeeve

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Captain Steeeve is a former U. S. Navy pilot and long-time commercial airline captain, now a popular YouTube personality known for his aviation insights, tips for nervous flyers, and plane crash analysis. Captain Steeeve recently retired from flying due to age limits after a decades-long career flying diverse aircraft like the Boeing 727, 757, 767, and 777. SPONSORS https://shopify.com/dannyjones - Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial & start selling today. https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. https://stopboxusa.com - Use code for 10% off your ENTIRE order + BOGO on the StopBox Pro. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS @CaptainSteeeve https://www.instagram.com/captainsteeeve FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Why pilots are forced to retire at 65 03:44 - Why pilots are susceptible to alcoholism & depression 06:56 - Getting hired as a military pilot 09:02 - How military planes hunt submarines 11:22 - Hunting soviet submarines during the Cold War 14:34 - President's doomsday plane 17:29 - Future of airplane technology 25:09 - Boeing vs. AirBus planes 26:45 - New AI airplane pilots 30:12 - Reinforced doors protecting pilots 36:08 - Captain Steeeve's 9/11 story 38:52 - American Airlines scrubbed names of 9/11 pilots 47:57 - The new airplane hijacking protocol 51:08 - Federal air marshals 56:12 - What happened to flight MH370 01:00:34 - MH370 engine transmissions 01:06:06 - Pilot addresses flat earth theory 01:09:00 - Airline UFO protocols 01:10:08 - Pilot's explanation for alien orbs 01:16:21 - Navy pilot UFO sighting 01:20:45 - Why takeoff is the most dangerous part of a flight 01:28:53 - Captain Steeeve's scariest flight 01:35:06 - What pilots should NEVER tell their passengers 01:39:21 - The truth about turbulence 01:42:13 - Why you should always wear your seatbelt on a plane 01:46:12 - Anomalies that cause plane crashes 01:48:56 - Why planes vanish in the Bermuda Triangle 01:53:30 - Air India 171 crash 01:56:24 - Captain Steeeve's interview with Megyn Kelly 01:59:48 - Japan Airlines' UFO encounter 02:04:17 - Moon missions & living on Mars 02:10:32 - Why it's Captain "Steeeve" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:06Danny Jones?

  Are you still a pilot, or are you retired now?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  So I retired two months ago.

• 1:11Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  When you turn 65, Congress fires you.

• 1:15Danny Jones?

  Congress?

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Congress, it's a law. It's the only non-government job that has a required retirement age in 65. It used to be 60, now it's 65. They're trying to raise the age again, but it's ridiculous because you're at the most experienced you are. I get a physical every six months for my entire career. Still pass all my physicals. I got cheaters with me, but that's about it.

• 1:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  And, yep, at 65, you're out. So, but now I'm retired, I'm on Medicare and unemployed, so, you know.

• 1:46Danny Jones?

  Is there any sort of a good reason for 65? Like, do they do any cognitive testing? Or is it just because of age strictly?

• 1:57Speaker 03

  No, so they do do cognitive testing, but it's not what you would think, like, sit down, take a test, you've got 20 minutes to pass it. It's not like that. Every time you take a check, right? And I take a check right every, I take a check right every nine months. And that's your cognitive test. And in addition to that, flying the airplane with two other co-pilots. So you get you get thoroughly examined all the time just by doing your job. And there's ways for other pilots to report you without having to, you know, kind of confront you like, hey, Steve, you know, you're kind of like, you know, you're missing a few things. There's a professional standards at each airline and they would just kind of call professional standards and say, hey, you know, Captain Steeeve here, he kind of missed about 25 radio calls on the last trip. And we think he's he's missing a, you know, a thing or two.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  And then they'll call you up and they'll start that process. Most pilots will catch it on their own, you know, and but the the process of getting a physical every six months. So war it it kind of identifies the issues as you're aging. So the the main, the first medical issues show up in your mid 30s. There's two things primarily that affect pilots and it's substance abuse and mental illness. So if you think about it, you know, alcoholism and and depression are the two biggies. And those show up in much younger pilots. If you get to be 64, 64 and a half, and you haven't developed any sort of cardiac issues, any sort of cognitive issues, you don't have diabetes, you're probably one of the most physically fit. You've come through that whole gauntlet.

• 3:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  And then six months later, they force you to retire. And the background on that goes all the way back to 1959. There wasn't a pilot retirement age until 1959. When C R. Smith, who is the CEO of American Airlines, was having golf, playing golf with his neighbor, who happened to be the head of the FAA at the time, and they were, he was complaining about how expensive that his pilots were over age 60. And so the two of them concocted a plan to introduce a mandatory retirement age. They didn't hold any hearings, nothing. They rammed it right through Congress. They made it a law, and it's been a law. It was a law until 2007. And then President Bush added five years to it. Congress passed

• 4:10Speaker 03

  the five year extension. Now it's age 65. But still, you turn 65 and you're out regardless of how.

• 4:16Danny Jones?

  Now we're getting to the bottom of it.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:18Danny Jones?

  Too expensive.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Back then it was. Now it doesn't make any difference. If I stayed another two years, I wouldn't cost the company any more money. I wouldn't make, you know, I would continue to make money, but they wouldn't replace me with another captain that's making the same money. It's just you keep the experience in the cockpit. That's the key to it is you're taking the most experienced pilot and pulling them out arbitrarily because it's a one size fits all policy. It doesn't make any sense.

• 4:44Danny Jones?

  What is it about being an airplane pilot? Or is there anything about being an airplane pilot that predisposes certain individuals to things like depression and alcoholism and drug abuse?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's, it's like any other job. It's, it's a lot of travel with it. And so, and along with that, there is certain amount of stress in the job. You don't, it's, it's like anything else. Once you do it for a long time, you don't really sense the stress, but it's kind of always present. It's like an underlying high baseline of stress in that job. Air traffic controllers are the same thing. You'll see the same issues show up with them. Depression, alcoholism, substance abuse, so on. You're on the road all the time. You're not eating well. You're always jet lagged. You're behind the clock. You're eating processed foods. And then what do you do to wind down at a layover? You go to the bar, get a couple of drinks. Maybe you go up to the room, get a couple of more. Most pilots are very good

• 5:36Speaker 03

  at obeying the restrictions. There's a 12 hour cutoff. They'll do that. But they'll drink right up to that 12 hour cutoff. And then when they go home, you know, the whole thing begins to snowball on them. So, you know, alcoholism is, it's an insidious thing and it'll take you over. But it shows up in much younger pilots. If you haven't developed a drinking problem by the time you're in your mid 60s, you're probably not going to.

• 5:59Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Totally. Well, I mean, think about like rock stars too. They have very similar lives in there, but their drinking kind of goes hand in hand with doing that. They're always on planes. They're always on the road, always traveling. Never seeing their family. You know, I always, I always think about this stuff because I've met a lot of people who like in different industries that live very similar lives and they all seem to have that follow that same pattern of like depression, being just unhappy, being always on the road, not around like their kids, if they have kids and they're always traveling.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Well, we're, we're creatures that were created for habit. We like our habits and our routines. I taught a course, I wrote a course for the Navy years ago. And one of the things I talked about was how we are predisposed to wanting to get into a routine. So no matter where you go, even if you're on the road, you'll have a road routine. Most people will, they'll get up, they'll go to their layover, they'll sleep for a couple hours, they'll get up, they'll take a run, they'll take a walk, they'll go get dinner at the same place at the same time. And it's, that's all part of the habitual thing that gives you kind of stability.

• 7:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  If you're at home and you're a nine to fiver, you're going to have a lot of stability in your life, more so than the person who's constantly packing their bag, unpacking their bag. And with the airlines, many times you'll pack your bag to go someplace and you won't get there. You know, like, so you got a trip that starts in Miami and you get to the airport and they go, we canceled your Miami leg. Now you're going to Dallas or now you're going to Minnesota and it's the middle of the winter. Well, wait a minute, I packed my, my, you know, my bathing suit for Miami. No, sorry, you're going to end up in Minneapolis, St. Paul tonight. So those kind of upheavals are, are the routine, the normal routine for a pilot. So a lot of that, that stability that most people have, it's kind of not there a lot of the times.

• 7:39Danny Jones?

  Right. Now, were you, were you in like the military before you flew commercial?

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Yep. I did nine years on active duty in the military and then I did another 21 years in the reserves. So about 30 years altogether.

• 7:50Danny Jones?

  As a pilot?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got trained as a pilot that I was, so this is a good story. I had no, I'd never been in an airplane before, the military and my best friend went to the Naval Academy. And he was, he was one of those guys in high school that knew what he wanted to do. Really super smart guy, got straight A's, got accepted to the Naval Academy. I was more of a knucklehead. I had a good time. Same thing with college and I got done with college and it was 1982 and the job market was super tight and nobody was hiring. And so I was on the phone with him one night and he said, why don't you get on the recruiter and tell him you want to be a pilot? I said, okay, walk me through that. So he did. And so I went down to the recruiter the next day and I walked in and after the small talk, the recruiter said, so what do you?

• 8:35Speaker 03

  What do you want to do? And I said, I want to be a pilot, just like that, you know, that pilot voice. And he laughed at me. He just looked at me and he goes, well, you and 40,000 other guys. And I said, I said, well, I don't want 40,000 spots, only want one. And he, he looked back and then, okay. Well, he goes, I like the attitude. He goes, let's, all right. Take, you gotta take tests. So they gave me a whole battery of tests. And then about three weeks later, he called me back and he goes, Hey, you did really well on the test. He said, in fact, you aced him. He said, come on back. He said, let's get your, your thing going. Let's see if we can get you that pilot spot. And so the next thing out of his mouth was, I need your college transcript. And I said, can we skip that part? He said, no, no, we gotta have it. And I said, well, so I sent it to him and he called me up and he goes, Steve, he goes, you had a good time in college, didn't you? I said,

• 9:18Speaker 03

  yeah. He goes, I don't know if we can send this in. He said, I, I'm not sure you're going to get accepted. I kind of sweet talked him into it and he did. And about six weeks later, he called me back. This is back in the day when the phone was on the wall. And I answered the phone and his voice was like three octaves higher. And he said, you're not going to believe this. He said, but they hired you. He said, you better get down here right now and sign on the dotted line. Wow. I ran down as fast as I could. And the rest is history. Did you, did you take off or land on an aircraft carrier? No. So just a couple of years prior to my getting hired in the, by the Navy, they were training everybody on the carrier, whether you went there or not. Uh huh. That was kind of a the bad use of resources, because if I'm not going to end up there in jets, then why are they training me to do it? Sure.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  So they got rid of that. I ended up flying an airplane called a P3. It's a big four engine turboprop that hunted submarines back in the day. Oh, wow. Yeah. Hunted submarines? Mm hmm. How, how, how did that work? That was fascinating. It, I loved it. There were 12 people on the crew. So there's three pilots, an engineer, and then a whole bunch of geeks in the back that ran computers. And it's pretty simple design. We would drop a buoy out of the back of the airplane, a little parachute on it, and it would cascade down to the water. And then it would drop a microphone down in the water, kind of like this. Really? And that little microphone would, would.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Transmit all of the sound in the water through a little one watt radio transmitter that's bobbing around on the ocean surface back to the airplane. And you drop a whole bunch of them all over the place. And then if there was some sort of mechanical frequency sound in the water and you look down and didn't see a ship on top of the water, something underneath the surface is making that mechanical noise because everything mechanical operates on a frequency where ambient noise doesn't. So then they would just kind of localize where the sound was coming from, they triangulate, and then there's your sub. And then you get a course and speed and you'd never have to see them, you'd be below the surface the entire time. We did that for years.

• 11:16Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's fascinating. It always boggles my mind how many submarines are traveling through the waters, like within miles of the coast of Florida or the coast of Southern California and just all around. And from every China, Russia, you name it, they're all circling every single ocean, like coming within, like within miles of, I guess, the international water zone, right before you get into like United States territory.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  And some submarines, you know, need to get closer, some not so much. The ones with the big intercontinental ballistic missiles, they can stay a couple thousand miles away, they don't need to be all that close. It was back in the old Soviet Union days, it was surprising how many submarines they had deployed at any given time.

• 12:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty terrifying. And especially like during the Cold War, you know, like that whole time when it was like that constant threat of of nuclear war.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Right. That's why I loved the mission we did. It was, it was, the Cold War, you know, was, it's kind of, there wasn't a lot going on, but there was actually because we wanted to keep track of where all of those Soviet submarines with the big missiles were at all times. So there was a thing that the president could do, I guess I can talk about this now, but it's because it's years ago, it's called a smooth touch. And he would, the president, it would come out of the Pentagon, but in theory it came from the president and the president would, we would be tracking these subs in real time. And if the, if the bubble went up, the balloon went upright and we said, okay, we're going to war. We wanted to get an asset, a P3 on top of a submarine within 30 minutes and to deliver

• 12:56Speaker 03

  a weapon if we had to. This is all simulated. Now, we don't, we never really did that.

• 12:59Danny Jones?

  To the submarine?

• 13:00Speaker 03

  To the submarine. So let's say we're going to war with the Soviet Union.

• 13:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  And the president gives out the order, you know, go after their subs, you know, the rules of engagement have changed and it's now DEFCON one and we're going to sink subs. So we'd be tracking this guy normally. We would localize him, come down within 30 minutes, open up the bomb bay's weapon away and sink a sub. And the aim was to do that within 20 to 30 minute timeframe. So sometimes we were more successful than others, but I only ever got a couple of those, you know, they would simulate one. You'd get a message, you'd be flying around on a normal night, tracking some submarine and all of a sudden the guy, the two seats behind you start screaming. He'd be, as soon as you'd hear his voice raise and he'd start screaming, I knew exactly what it was. And he'd run up to the cockpit and he'd show, you know, if you were the mission commander, he'd show you a piece

• 13:46Speaker 03

  of paper and it says smooth touch on it. And I'd be like, let's go, man, let's go.

• 13:50Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  So, you know, you'd announce that to the whole crew and then it was game on. And so you had to do it within 30 minutes. And we were successful the two times I had them. So, great simulated success. We'd never sank anybody.

• 14:02Danny Jones?

  Right, right. And the crazy thing about that is if like a nuke was ever launched, all of that's futile. Like nothing matters now.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 14:12Danny Jones?

  Because once one, once one, I learned this from this book called Nuclear War by Andy Jacobson. Once one nuke is launched, that means they're all launched.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 14:22Danny Jones?

  Because I guess they have this thing called launch on warning to where if the United States detects with their radar and with their satellites that there's an incoming ICBM, we have to assume that they're going to try to take out our ICBM sites that can't, like in Montana and that part of the Midwest. So we have to get rid of them. It's use it or lose it. So we have to get, launch all those, hopefully at the place we think the ICBM is coming from.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 14:50Danny Jones?

  And within like 12 minutes or something insane like that. So.

• 14:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, once one launches, they're all launching and then it's it's just Armageddon.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  And that was the real world, you know, back then, the the old movie War Games, which was, you know, kind of a funny, silly movie, but it was the serious side of that was what happens if the computer messes up and and launches a fake attack, right?

• 15:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  You know, there's there was a bunch more serious movies made back in the 60s and 70s with the same kind of premise, you know, the world goes to nuclear war overnight.

• 15:22Danny Jones?

  Doctor Strangelove.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:24Danny Jones?

  That was a classic.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, because the computer got it wrong, but, you know, we're not out of that yet, but it's not it's not as present as it was back then.

• 15:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:34Danny Jones?

  And we have these things called doomsday planes, too. You've seen that? The doomsday plane?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  No.

• 15:40Danny Jones?

  That the president has to fly on. It's like a, um, find a photo of the doomsday plane. It's like a super rugged, like, tank version of Air Force One. And apparently it's got all the windows blocked out for radiation. It's like it's like coated in a special material to block out like nuclear radiation. And it's got this antenna that it drops um, to like pick up radio signals that like drops it from underneath the plane.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 16:11Danny Jones?

  Find some images of it, Steve. That's not a very good image. That's not the doomsday plane. It can fly 12 hours without refueling. Is that normal?

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, so you the limitation on how long those airplanes can stay airborne is not so much the fuel, but the oil in the engines. So you can refuel Air Force One and stay airborne in theory as long as the pilots are, you know, okay, but the eventually the engines are going to run out of oil.

• 16:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  So that's your limiting factor.

• 16:41Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, so I guess the idea about this is like they have to uh, to maintain continuity of the government. They have to put the president in this thing. If there's a nuclear war and they fly in circles, I guess, just until they run out of gas and figure out a place to land.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:56Danny Jones?

  But the people in the submarines will be the ones that last the longest because they're underwater and they're filled by nuclear power.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 17:02Danny Jones?

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• 18:31Speaker 03

  Never.

• 18:32Danny Jones?

  Never.

• 18:34Danny Jones?

  It's amazing that airplanes are like, it's so wild to me how airplanes don't, like commercial airliners, it doesn't seem like they've evolved at all in the last 50 years.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Correct, they haven't.

• 18:47Danny Jones?

  It's like they're the same thing.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:49Danny Jones?

  Isn't that, do you find that weird?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Back when I was a kid, everything was gonna be supersonic transport by this time. By the year 2000, everything was by the year 2000. You know, there was going to be 100 billion people on the planet, but we were all going to be traveling, you know, supersonic and that that didn't happen only because it was too expensive and too loud. The people around those airports hated those airplanes and you could only get about 80 people. It's like a regional jet.

• 19:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  That you pay.

• 19:14Danny Jones?

  12,000 a ticket.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Paid 12,000 for a coach seat just to get there a couple of hours earlier. And so you, you know, let's say you go across the Atlantic in three and a half hours, but you got stuck in traffic going to JFK and that ate up another two or three hours and it ends up being the same amount of time anyway. So it's like, why did I do this? And the, and the airlines had a more as kind of a halo thing, the prestige thing to have those supersonic jets. Now, I think the age is coming back because the technology has actually caught up with it. There's a company called Boom out of North Carolina.

• 19:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I heard about that.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  You know, American Airlines has 29 the options for airplanes. I don't think they've built an airplane yet, but they've, it's that they're designing it still. So, you know, we'll see, uh, remains to be determined, but I think the future will be hypersonic travel at some point.

• 20:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So one of the reasons they like the, um, the Concorde, I think one of the reasons they stopped it was because, um, I mean, obviously the things that you mentioned, but like, to me, it just seemed like that was the, that was the, um,

• 20:23Danny Jones?

  basically that was what was happening with everything during the Cold War. We were racing the Soviets and I think they had some sort of a prototype of a supersonic jet like this. And then, so we were like, oh, we gotta create one too. And then we came to the Concorde and then it was like, oh my God, this is like insane to manage. It's like, this is way too hard. It's like sprinting to try to get this done and it's costing so much money. It was breaking. I think they had to keep one on standby in New York and it was like, that was not very cost effective. And, um, and I think one crashed in France, if I can remember correctly.

• 20:58Danny Jones?

  A year before nine eleven and then nine eleven happened and then all of the stock or all like the airline companies like their stock plummeted because of nine eleven and that like wasn't that was like dark ages of air travel.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that Air France crash is what doomed the the Concorde altogether because it wasn't cost effective. It was it was a nightmare to maintain. Again, it was a prestige airplane for the airlines and they were looking for a way to back out. And when that airplane finally crashed, I think they said, you know, this is our exit strategy.

• 21:27Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  On the Concorde and it never came back. Now it will sometime in the future, but it's got to be cost effective.

• 21:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  At the end of the day, an airline, you have to have your head examined to run an airline because even in a great year for an airline, you maybe make two or three percent profit in a year. It's just

• 21:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  There's too many moving parts. There's think of all the things that have wheels and are associated with running an airline. It's it's just a nightmare that it runs as well as it actually does. And now you throw in an expensive airplane that people don't have the appetite to pay. At this point, they'd be paying fifteen, twenty thousand dollars a seat for.

• 22:02Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  You know, they're just not gonna do it.

• 22:04Danny Jones?

  Even if it's not supersonic, it was it's like, I mean, what the reason that airplanes are they from what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong, we take planes from like the eighties and nineties and we just refurbish them, right? And put new engines on them, new seats inside, redo the interior, but it's essentially the same design. Everything's the same as what they were in the eighties and nineties.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Sort of. I mean, when you get down to the like, if you look at cars from the seventies and in cars today.

• 22:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  They have a lot of the same things. They have four wheels, a steering wheel. Some of them do at least steering wheel still.

• 22:37Danny Jones?

  Kind of.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Kind of. But but the technology has improved and the build quality has improved dramatically since then. So all of the technological advantages show up in in the little things. And so

• 22:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, gosh.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  The reliability stuff, the stuff I deal with as a pilot is much more reliable than it was, you know, thirty or forty years ago. So the airplanes, I think, they look the same. They're kind of the same basic thing. But the seven eighty seven is a total departure. It's all carbon fiber and and it's it's a lighter, more nimble airplane in a lot of ways. They had some issues rolling it out, but I think it's

• 23:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Kind of the future of. You know, airliner design.

• 23:15Danny Jones?

  What makes so because it's carbon fiber?

• 23:19Speaker 03

  So if you watch the wings on a seven eighty seven, you know,

• 23:21Danny Jones?

  Find a seven eighty seven, Steve.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, when it, when it first takes off and it rotates, the wings bend way up. Like you'd look at it and go, oh, that looks uncomfortable. Is that normal? It's normal. It's the way they designed it. So it almost like a bird. The wings go up and then the airplane eventually settles in the wings come back down. But it's meant to have a lot of flexibility in those wings. It's a nice, much nicer ride. They've got, see the, how the wings bend up? That's not, that's not, you know, the camera doing that. That's actually how it flies. And

• 23:51Danny Jones?

  That's what it looks like when it's cruising?

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 23:53Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Just like that. Right. And then when it sits on the ground, they're, they're flat as can be. But when it gets airborne, it, they, it's designed like that.

• 24:01Danny Jones?

  Now, is this the same plane that? There was a new plane that Boeing came out with where they had to move the engines up above the wing a little bit. And that was causing lots of issues and like crashes.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  That was the MAX. So when they, yeah, so that's, I think. The seven thirty seven, all the variants are the most prolific airplane on the planet. They at least are rivaled by Airbus, but, but seven thirty sevens have been around forever. They've had a dozen different versions of it. When they came out with the MAX, it was to put bigger engines on it, more fuel efficient and so forth.

• 24:38Danny Jones?

  And this was to compete with Airbus, right?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, but then they kind of cut some corners and the corner cutting was we had to move the engines, the center of gravity of the airplane changed and they thought they could take care of that with a software fix. And that, and that's, and then, then when they did put the software fix in place, they didn't tell the pilots about it and they only had, they had the, the, the software. Was forcing the nose of the airplane over because it thought the airplane was stalling. So if the airplane is stalling, it's getting slow. Right. The airflow over the wings is disrupted. Yeah. So the airplane is now saying, an Airbus does this all the time. It noses the airplane over for you so that you don't stall the airplane.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  It's usually based on two or three inputs from different systems telling it that you're actually stalling. What happened with the MAX initially was there was only one input. And if that one input gave you erroneous information, they would, they would push the nose over. And the pilots didn't know what was going on because they hadn't been trained in it. And so they're like, you know, they're trying to, they're fighting the airplane. They're pulling back, but the, the computer's pushing it over there, pulling back. And so they, they crashed two of them. They grounded the whole fleet, went back, fixed not only the software issue, but also the hardware part of it. With the engines and all of that. And so now they haven't had any problems since. So it's been, I think it'll be reliable going forward, but it's a, was a heck of a price to pay. Good Lord. Yeah. Did you ever fly one of those? Nope.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  No, I love Boeing products in general. Do you? I get so much criticism on my channel for this because. Why? Well, because I've been a Boeing guy my whole life. And so the, the difference between Boeing and Airbus is this. Airbus is like a computer that has an airplane attached to it.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Boeing is a airplane that has a computer assisting it. So it, and it's just a basic general philosophy, but you're managing a computer when you're flying an Airbus. So it's fly by wire. So since you got a joystick over here and you're flying the airplane, but there's no real cable or anything going out to your flight controls. It's a digital signal that goes to another box. It does another thing, it does another thing. The advantages of it is it's a little more quick than, than the old yoke in a Boeing. But, and it also saves a little bit of weight. But beyond that, again, it's like going back to Hal from the 2001 space odyssey. When Dave's trying to get the bay doors open in hell, saying, I'm sorry, I won't allow that.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  The computer sometimes overrides the pilot. On a Boeing, a pilot can always override the computer, but not so on an Airbus.

• 27:19Danny Jones?

  Except on that MAX before they had that issue.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Cause they didn't know what was going on.

• 27:23Danny Jones?

  Right. Cause it was brand new.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Right. And so the, the initial kind of take on that was the, you know, a more experienced crew would have handled it different. I'm not sure about that. What I, what I do know is that, that they, they hid something. They didn't train the pilots on it. And that was, that was another layer of the mistake that was made with that airplane.

• 27:43Danny Jones?

  Do you think maybe, maybe they've already done it, but at what point do you think they're going to start incorporating AI into these planes?

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Well, they're already starting with that. And I was, I was on with Piers Morgan a few months ago, and he, at the end of the interview, he, he said, you think there's are going to be a pilotless airplane? And I said, well, no. He said, what do you mean? Because there's, you know, cars that have no driver. And he said, I was just in one out in Los Angeles. And I said, well, that's a different deal. I said, you're talking about two dimensions as opposed to three. Okay. And, and if you've got a problem in your car, it's just going to pull over and shut down and you get out and go, and you call the company or you go on the app and say, send me another car. That's different. You can't do that in an airplane. And now will AI assist in, in technology, making the pilots load lighter? Yeah, sure. And I'm all for that. I think that's great. Could

• 28:33Speaker 03

  I see a future where they get rid of one of the three pilots in the cockpit because of AI? I hope not. Only, only because of the few emergencies I've had over the years. That third pilot, especially in an international flight, that third pilot is worth their weight in gold. Because you and the co-pilot are busy running checklist, flying the airplane. That's your administrative assistant. They can look everything up that you don't have time to do because you're busy. And so having that third person there is hugely important. Now, could AI do that? I'm sure I suppose so, but.

• 29:07Danny Jones?

  Let me ask you this, though. Can, sorry to interrupt, but could somebody potentially take control? If there was an issue with a remote control or an airplane that was not manned, was just run by AI pilotless, would there be an option for someone on the ground to take remote control of the airplane if something goes south?

• 29:24Speaker 03

  So here's, here's my idea, my business model. You might want to invest in this.

• 29:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  It's the. It's the PID program. I used to call it the pilot in Dallas, but I think maybe the pilot in Delhi is probably better. But at any rate, we'll find the right place to base this thing. And then it's basically you go down to a single pilot in the airplane and the co-pilots are a guy sitting down in a room like this with a bank of computers and screens and he's monitoring 25 flights all at the same time. Now, the selling point on that is you have a real pilot in the airplane, right? But now the airplane becomes hijack proof. Because if somebody on the airplane tries to hijack the airplane, the guy down on the ground, Steve down on the ground says, I'm sorry, we're not gonna allow that. He just hits a button and takes over control of the airplane.

• 30:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  And says, we're gonna fly this to a safe place where the police can intercept this airplane and so forth. So there won't ever be another 9/11 style hijacking with this system. But the downside of it, a couple of people have pointed out to me is, what if the guy running it on the ground gets, you know, taken over and they take over all these airplanes? So there's no perfect system out there. I'm trying to work out that.

• 30:35Danny Jones?

  See, I would, I would imagine that after 9/11, we would have figured out how to take over airplanes. Because if it does get hijacked, you want to have somebody in the Pentagon who can tap into that airplane and just take control of it.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  In theory, the technology would be there to do that. But again, it's technology you would only maybe use once in a century. It's heavy. You'd have to carry it around all the time. You'd have to test it all the time. It's not, they're never going to do that because it's just too expensive. Everybody's going to push back on that.

• 31:04Danny Jones?

  Seems like basic technology, though. Like, it doesn't seem like it's that complicated.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Well, then you're also talking about the government trying to do something to make sense. And it took, it took a couple of years for them to put reinforced doors in between us and the public. And they still haven't put in secondary doors. I don't understand why. It's a $50 fix per airplane, right? And then in the military, I had cargo nets that would clip, clip, and clip like that. 50 bucks. And so you put a secondary barrier outside the cockpit. When the pilots come out to go to the bathroom, you clip the things in place. Nobody can get through it. Pilots come out, do their business. When they go back up to the cockpit and close their door, you take the clips and throw it, wad it up and throw it back in the closet. And that's a fix. And they still haven't done that. Congress last year mandated that every

• 31:49Speaker 03

  new airplane being built has a secondary barrier now. And it's a big, complicated second door. You know.

• 31:57Danny Jones?

  So right now, the, the door between the cockpit and the main cabin is something that someone could break through fairly easily.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  It's a Kevlar reinforced door with lots of latches on it and it'll, it'll lock nice and tight. But here's the problem with a single door, though. With a single door, it, it works for you or it works against you. So that door is going to have to open at some time during the flight, right? Uh, for people from other nature. So you gotta go to the bathroom and if you're a bad guy and you time it right and you can get in through that door and you close it, now it's you and one pilot up in the cockpit and you've got the door now working in your favor as the bad guy because now it's locked, you throw the latch, nobody can get in that door.

• 32:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  So all your able-bodied, uh, men in the back of the airplane, they're going to take on that bad guy. He's on the other side of this barrier that you can't break. So it's, it's a two-edged, it's a double edged sword.

• 32:50Danny Jones?

  I see what you're saying. So there would have to be two separate locks.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Two separate doors.

• 32:55Danny Jones?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Secondary barrier. That's the only way to fix the problem. And, and there was not a willingness on anybody's part to spend 50 bucks an airplane and fix it.

• 33:03Danny Jones?

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• 33:45Danny Jones?

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• 34:30Danny Jones?

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• 35:15Danny Jones?

  Well, they haven't. There's been a few attempted cockpit breaches, but it was usually somebody that was out of their mind or, you know, an ambient and alcohol. And, you know, there was, it wasn't an organized, you know, thing that was going on now. Right, right. I was watching a video the other day on, I think it was on Instagram, of this dude just joyriding this plane, like this, have you seen this? This guy's like, he's kind of, he's communicating with the tower. And they're like, have you ever flown before? He's like, no. He's like, I just got bored and I wanted to take this thing for, for a ride. My life's not going too good right now. And they're like, well, we're gonna try to get you to land this thing. He's like, I don't know. I don't know if I want to come back. Yeah. And then I think he crashed it.

• 35:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I saw that video. There was another guy over in Vancouver that stole an airplane and he wanted to make a political protest. So he, he stole this little Cessna and flew it up and he was just flying over top of Vancouver Airport for hours, disrupting traffic. Oh, no. Broadcasting his, his manifesto over the radio.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  And then the the controller on the ground finally got it. And this guy is brilliant. So the controller makes a fake call at first. It was actually real. But at first he makes a fake call to somebody else, but he broadcasts it. He says, hey, yeah, the the F 16s are inbound and they're about they're about eight minutes out. And he said, yeah, it's weapons away. He's he's just making all this stuff up. It wasn't. It was about an hour later that the actual F 16s made it up. But this guy, he hears it on the thing. He's like, yeah, I'm gonna get shot down a bit of land.

• 36:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  He brings he brings it around and lands on the next thing the cops arrest him and take him off, you know?

• 36:48Danny Jones?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  But that air traffic controller should get a an award for that.

• 36:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's a great. That was. That's a very creative idea. I like that. Um, so out of all the airplane disasters or conspiracies, which one is most interesting to you or your favorite?

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Well, I've got I've got a nine 11 story.

• 37:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. So my my background goes like this. I was originally scheduled to be the co pilot on the first airplane that was hijacked on September 11.

• 37:18Danny Jones?

  What?

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so I was based in Boston at the time. There's a film on called In My Seat on YouTube. And it's actually what got the Captain Steeeve channel started back in 2011 for the 10th anniversary of nine 11. We made just a 15 minute documentary about my story. So my story goes like this. I was a first officer, a co pilot at American Airlines at the time, based in Boston, and I was on reserve and reserve means that you're on call to fill in for another pilot. They can't make it. They're sick or they have to go to training or whatever. They'll call you the day before and assign you a trip that's not assigned. And on September 10, 2001, which is a day that means more to me than the 11th, actually. On the 10th, I had been watching a trip. It had been open all weekend.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  It was a really nice trip. It was a morning departure out of of Boston to Los Angeles. And very senior trip and nobody picked it up. It was just there in open time. Nobody picked it up. So the day before then, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, they will assign the trip to somebody on reserve. So I looked on the list of reserve pilots and there was only one guy on call for the 11th and that was me. So the computer then will automatically assign your name to the trip. And then about 30 minutes after the assignment, the somebody, a real person will call just to make sure that you've seen the assignment and know that you're going to work tomorrow. So I had at three o'clock in the afternoon, I went over the computer and I looked and sure enough, I had been assigned the trip. My name was assigned to it. I told my wife, I'm going to Los Angeles tomorrow. I packed my bags, put them in the car, set my alarm,

• 38:47Speaker 03

  and just waited for the phone to ring. And we kind of lost track of it because sometimes they'd take more than a half an hour to call. And about, I don't know, about 7:30 that night, I said to her, I go, did they ever call? And she goes, I don't think so. I looked at her phone, I looked at mine. I thought, well, I better double check. So I go back to the computer and I logged in and sure that some other guy's name was on the trip. Okay, I don't care. I would still get paid to stay home. And so I went into work, I went into the Navy the next day. I was doing some Navy work then. And I'm watching 9/11 on the screens like everybody else. Like I walked in and I'm watching these airplanes crash. And I never connected because they were talking at first like 10 airplanes had been hijacked and it was American Airlines and some United. They didn't know. It was a lot of confusion in those first few hours. And, and I was on the Navy base and we were going to war and

• 39:31Speaker 03

  it was nuts. So I later on that evening, I went home and we, I got in on my computer because I thought, maybe I can look up the names of the crews that were on those flights. Because I know the back doorway in at American. So I logged in and tried to find the names of them on the manifest. And when the screen came up in front of me, it looked exactly like it did 24 hours ago, the day before, when I saw my name assigned to the trip. And I looked at the screen and all the names are scrubbed off the trip. Really? Yeah. All it said was, "Sequence failed continuity", which is a code that they put on every flight that doesn't make it to its destination. So

• 40:13Speaker 03

  if you have to divert for weather or some other reason. Well, you talk about an understatement, you know, "Sequence failed continuity", no kidding. And I just looked at the screen. I was just like in shock. I just, I just stared. And a few minutes later, my wife came around the corner and she said, you know, what are you doing? I said, remember I told you I was going to LA today? And she said, yeah. I said, that was the first airplane that got hijacked this morning.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  And it's still

• 40:39Speaker 03

  it's a moment, right? And so all the radio interviews and everything over the years, they always ask me the same question. How does that? How'd that make you feel? And I, I don't have an answer. It's there's the best I can come up with is there's an empty space where feeling should be. Cause you can't get angry. You can't get sad. You're, you know, it's just hard to describe. It's just, it was a, it's a vacant feeling. Um, and I still, I, I was watching, okay, this, I, I don't normally get political and I'm not trying to now, but after Trump got shot in the ear in Butler,

• 41:15Speaker 03

  the two days later, three days later was Republican National Convention. He's sitting there with that bandage on his ear and the cameras going over to him and he's got that, he's got that thousand yard stare in his eyes. And I was looking at him, I thought, oh, I know exactly what's going through his brain. He's sitting there and all this hubbub is going on around him and he's having that moment where he's searching for a feeling that he should feel and there isn't one. And he's going through the, he's nodding and being polite, but inside he's, there's a vacant feeling right now. Cause he, the reality of a bullet wasn't by your, your head that close and taken off the top of your ear. There's nothing like that. You can't, there's no way to describe that feeling other than, wow, okay. Well, now what am I going to do next? You know, so there's an obligation that comes with

• 41:59Speaker 03

  that, I think, you know, when you've been, the, the talk I give associated with it is living on borrowed time. Cause I am, I can mark on the calendar when I, I should have died and I didn't. So the rest of my life has been marked by, you know, let's, let's make the most out of this thing that I can.

• 42:16Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:20Danny Jones?

  I'm sure you think about that all the time.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does. It's like Groundhog Day for me because I, I still spend probably 20 times a year going around and we show the film, the in my seat film, and then I go and tell them that my story in various venues and it's like reliving it over and over again. But you know, there's an obligation. You have to tell the story, right? It's not my story to keep to myself.

• 42:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:44Danny Jones?

  So when you logged back on to the thing, the computer back, backdoored into the computers the next day, it still hadn't updated. So it said that you were still assigned to it?

• 42:54Speaker 03

  No, it, they had taken all the names off of it.

• 42:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, it had all been scrubbed?

• 42:57Speaker 03

  So that other guys like me trying to find the names couldn't report them to the media. They wanted to keep the, they'll, that's one of the protocols right away. Like if there's an incident or an accident, they'll scrub the names off the list right away. So the media can't get ahold of them. They want to make sure they can get to the families first, let them know what's going on. And then, you know, it was about a week later, I think they finally came out, we hear the names of the crew members that run those flights.

• 43:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:20Danny Jones?

  Good Lord, man.

• 43:23Danny Jones?

  How much, how much attention did you pay to all of the media about that directly, right after it happened? Like they played phone calls and stuff like that from people from, from in the air calling their loved ones. And like you hear them, the one, I think the one in Pennsylvania, like they were like talking about like trying to go like breach through the door or something to get him. And there were so, there were so much.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  There was a lot and you couldn't get away from it for a while because right after nine 11, it was just all was the news was absorbed with it. But if you ever go to the Flight 93 Memorial, the one in Pennsylvania, it's a really, really good memorial and they have all of those recordings playing there. So you can go around and there's little walls hanging, there's phones hanging on the walls. And you can go and there's pictures and memorabilia from the flight and you can go and listen to those various recordings. And, you know, after, for me, after listening about three or four of them, I was like, that I'm done. You know, that's enough. Cause it's just, it's, even now, it's still hard to kind of bring all this up.

• 44:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Cause the ramifications of all of it, it just is, um, you know, the more you talk about it, the more real it, it still becomes.

• 44:32Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 44:34Danny Jones?

  And you were living where at the time?

• 44:36Speaker 03

  I was living in Maine at the time.

• 44:37Danny Jones?

  You were living in Maine at the time?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  Yep. I was pastoring a church up there. We started a church in, in Topsom, Maine.

• 44:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  I was a senior pastor of a church we started and, and it was an ideal job, me being on reserve with the airlines. And started in church because there's no money to plant a church up in that part of the country. So I didn't have to take a salary, but we could, I could be more or less a full-time pastor as long as they would give me up like for two trips a month. That's about what I would fly in those days on reserve. And the church is more than happy though. Yeah, great. You know, if we can have a full-time pastor, well, you know, if you want to go, you know, Monday through Wednesday and fly two trips a month, awesome.

• 45:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  It worked out.

• 45:16Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. So that could fund everything for you in just a couple of flights, just a couple of flights a month?

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yep. Yep. When you're on reserve, you could pay just a straight salary, no matter how much you fly.

• 45:25Danny Jones?

  So like, I mean, not, not to linger on the dark stuff, but what, how did that like affect your work after that and people around you being in an airline pilot after nine 11? Like, I'm sure it had to have been weird, to say the least.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. It's, it's not, it's not the first near-death experience I had in an airplane. So the, you know, the Navy time, there was a couple of moments where, you know, my knees were knocking after a flight and, and so you kind of get a little inoculated that. And, and remember my nine 11 story was, it wasn't like I was on the airplane and I escaped. I just didn't get the, they didn't finalize the assignment. And so here's, here's the rest of the story. So people will ask, well, how did you get off the flight? So I had seen my name assigned to the flight. There was a guy, the guy who eventually took it is, his name was Tommy Guinness. And Tom was celebrating his 42nd birthday on the 10th of September with his wife and his two kids.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  And Tom had been, he was a line-holding pilot. He was one of the guys I would fill in for. He could pick up extra trips if he wanted to, to kind of fill out his schedule. Tom had been looking at that trip all weekend and doing the, we do this all the time. It's like, ah, do I want it? I don't know. You know, you go back and forth and do I want to go to work? So he got his birthday celebration out of the way and he, he looked at the trip one last time and I had already been assigned to the trip. But there was a little code next to my name that says they hadn't made the phone call yet. So until they make the phone call, it's not final, final. So he said to his wife, hey, I'm thinking about taking a trip tomorrow. She's like, yeah, it's fine. So he calls up and says, hey, is it too late? Can I still get that trip? And the scheduler says, well, no, but you gotta let me know. So he talks to his wife,

• 47:13Speaker 03

  gets back on the phone, says, yeah, I'll take the trip. So at that moment, they erased my name from the trip. They put Tom's on it. Oh, my God. And then the rest is history. So Tom was just trying to provide for his family, pick up an extra trip. It was a wonderful trip. It was the most senior trip on the schedule. Early morning departure out of Boston, early return the next day. It was a luxury trip. Direct flight to LA. Direct to LA, direct back, got back. You got back home by five o'clock the next day, time for dinner. So, you know, really nice trip. And, but, so he took the trip, they erased my name. And that stuff happens all the time in scheduling with the airlines. Sometimes you don't even see it. I only met him once. I didn't really know him. I wouldn't even call him an acquaintance.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  I remember bumping into him once. I know much more of his story now. His, his son, Tom Junior, followed in his dad's footsteps. Really? So my son and his son are about the same age. They're like in their late 30s now. My son's a filmmaker and he's a producer of my channel. And his son became a pilot. And he, I, I talked to him one time on the phone. I text him almost every September 11th to just say, hey, thinking about you and so forth. But he was about to get his interview with American Airlines, mainline American. And he said, you know, do you think they're going to hire me? And do you have any advice? And I said, Tom, I said, I don't know what the hiring practices are these days at, at American. This is back in like the 2011,

• 48:37Speaker 03

  2012 timeframe. I said, but if they don't hire you, they're crazy. Just, just for the story of it all. And they hired him. And he might be a captain now for, for all I know. He's, he's a super sharp guy. His dad was a Top Gun trained pilot to really sharp people. Phew.

• 48:58Danny Jones?

  Have you ever thought about, or like, maybe there's training that goes into this? For like, those kinds of situations? For like, a couple dudes come in with box cutters, or whatever it is, to try to like, breach the cockpit? Like, I'm sure you've spent hours and days probably processing this kind of stuff hypothetically in your head.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the paradigm shifted after 9/11, because the paradigm prior to that was the old hijack model of, they want to hijack an airplane, land it someplace, publish a manifesto in the newspaper, get their names on the news, to get their cause out there. And they might threaten to kill some people, and they might even do it, but they're not gonna fly an airplane into a building. Like, who in the world would do that? They'd be killing themselves by doing that.

• 49:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  So that was the old model, until it all changed on 9/11. And it shows you how quickly a paradigm can shift. That paradigm changed on September 11th, 2001. By the time the fourth airplane, United 93, was still being hijacked, the people in the back of the airplane had gotten word, "Hey, you guys aren't going to go land someplace to publish a manifesto. These guys are serious, they're flying these airplanes into buildings. You're all gonna die." So with that information, Todd Beamer and the rest of the guys in the back of the airplane said, "Well, if we're gonna die, we're gonna die fighting."

• 50:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  So they tried to take over the airplane. They did break into the cockpit. There was a fight in the cockpit, there was, it's all in the cockpit voice recorder.

• 50:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the guy, the terrorist at the controls was shaking the airplane back and forth to try to get these guys to hit the overhead and come off of him. And then he finally just turned the airplane around and just nosed it right into the ground. So, the only fortunate part of that is they didn't hit the Capitol, or the White House, or wherever they were headed.

• 50:46Danny Jones?

  I've never heard that recording, I didn't know that that was...

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you go to the Flight 93 Memorial, all that stuff is there. And they got the transcripts of what took place, you know? Just, in the cockpit, there's just a lot of yelling and screaming. But they actually got back into the cockpit. And I don't know if they had a pilot onboard that could have flown the airplane, but they never did regain total control of the airplane.

• 51:08Danny Jones?

  Good lord.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:10Danny Jones?

  And whatever happened to the black boxes? Did they ever find those?

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, they found all those.

• 51:14Danny Jones?

  They did?

• 51:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:17Danny Jones?

  That's so scary, man. So, so now, what is the protocol?

• 51:23Speaker 03

  So now the protocol has changed and it's because of nine eleven, it's, you know, we got the, we've got the armored door between us. I don't come out unless it's a positive handoff. We have to have somebody else, a flight attendant, come in, close the door. There's strict security over opening and closing the door. All of that stuff is, they put carts out, you know, serving carts out to block people from trying to run into the cockpit. And then the, the, the backup option is able-bodied passengers. So if somebody is on board, there's a lot more federal air marshals than there ever used to be before. But, you know, I wouldn't be stretching the truth to tell you there's not a federal air marshal on every single flight. You know, you can't have that big of government agency, but there are on a lot of flights.

• 52:08Danny Jones?

  What is, for people that don't know, what is a federal air marshal?

• 52:11Speaker 03

  They're just a cop on an airplane. So they're there, they blend in.

• 52:15Danny Jones?

  Undercover cop?

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Undercover cop and their whole job is to be the law on an airplane. So essentially, they're there to make sure that the airplane doesn't get hijacked. Right? So if you're, if you're, if you're pulling a misdemeanor-

• 52:29Danny Jones?

  They're allowed to carry a gun on them.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And, and if they get, you get sideways with a flight attendant and there's a little argument, the federal air marshal is not going to intervene. This is for the serious stuff that they're there for. But without federal air marshals on every airplane, the conventional wisdom is that able-bodied passengers will tackle and subdue somebody that tries to get in the cockpit.

• 52:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  Right. You would jump out of your seat and jump on somebody right away. If they, you know, they're yelling something and they break into the cockpit, you'd be out of your seat in a heartbeat and you'd be all over that guy. So-

• 53:00Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 53:02Danny Jones?

  That reminds me, I was watching, uh, there's this, there's this professional skateboarder, his name's Bam, Bam Margera, and he said he was on, I was just, this is like totally random, but is relevant. He said that he was on a flight back from like, um, Abu Dhabi or something like this. And one of his fans was like walking by him going, bum, bum. Cause his name is Bam. He's like, dude, shut up, shut up. He's like bum, bum. Like pointing out.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Things you don't want to say.

• 53:36Danny Jones?

  That's like, yeah, hopefully there's an air marshal.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  We had a guy, I just did a video on this. We had a guy, um, I was walking down the jet bridge. I was in uniform going down in the airplane and this passenger makes a joke about, you know, I hope you weren't up drinking too late last night or something along those lines. I'm like, sir, please, you know, you can't make those jokes. And he doubled down about the accusing me of being drunk thing. And I'm like, so the third time he made the joke, I was like, stop, give me your ticket, what seat are you sitting in? Let's go back out. And I had to get pulled off the flight. Cause at that point, all these other passengers have heard, you know, the whisper down the lane, this guy, he's accusing me of being drunk. So I had to go down and get the, the blood test and the urine analysis and all that stuff. And, uh, and he got pulled off the flight. I'm sure he got reaccommodated, but there's

• 54:23Speaker 03

  certain things you don't say at, at certain places. Like you're going through TSA, you don't say what you just said. Um, that's, there's no humor there at all. And, and if you accuse a pilot of drinking or being drunk as he's about to step on the airplane, that's, there's no tolerance for that kind of joke.

• 54:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah. You had a video about a guy smoking weed in the, in the bathroom.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it. That was it.

• 54:46Danny Jones?

  And, uh, I guess they had to do a mayday and land the airplane because there's a protocol that, I don't know if it's a protocol, but apparently there's like rigorous drug test. And if they would have got some secondhand smoke or whatever.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's, there's no latitude in any of that stuff. So let's say, for instance, they get a random drug test at the end of the flight and for some, now we all know, if a guy is smoking weed in the bathroom and you smell some on the outside, you're not going to pop positive for that most likely, but nobody wants to take that chance. And in addition to that, what's going on with this guy? I mean, there's other ways to ingest that sort of thing without smoking a doobie in the, in the bathroom on the airplane. You know, you're just asking for it.

• 55:28Danny Jones?

  Eat a gummy.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  When you're doing that. So he, there's, there was a lot more going on, but the pilots, you know, did they overreact? I don't know. Did I overreact? Nope. Because at some point you gotta go, hey, look, this is my livelihood, man. I worked a lot of years to get here and I'm not going to let you jeopardize it. So we're going to play it right by the book.

• 55:45Danny Jones?

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• 57:12Danny Jones?

  What is your take on the MH370 airplane that disappeared, the Malaysian Airlines?

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's an interesting one.

• 57:21Danny Jones?

  That's one of the craziest ones to me.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  It is. You know, the, the, all the theories came out right away. You know, somebody stole the airplane, they're gonna turn it into a bomb, you know. I just shook my head because I'm like, first of all, there's, there's only a few runways around the planet where you can land an airplane that big. Then to hide the airplane, you have to have a huge hangar. And seven, triple sevens don't fit all the way into most hangars, like the tail will stick out.

• 57:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 57:46Speaker 03

  And then, on top of that, you had, what, how many people on, 250 people, let's say, onboard the airplane?

• 57:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  You would have to get, you'd have to, I guess, kill all of those people, or, or, and then, think about how many people it would take to coordinate a plot like that. You'd have to keep everybody silent. Nobody would come in front of a camera behind a microphone and spill the beans about what happened. So, so none of that stuff was ever plausible, even though there's people that write books about it, make videos about it. That airplane is probably down at the bottom of a very deep ocean. Right. And so deep that they they'll never find it because they haven't found it up to this point. Two things. One, the fix for that is floatable black box that you could put in the in the tail of the airplane that on impact ejects and floats. Okay. Then you would have found you would have found where that airplane was within. And that connects to satellites or something?

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Well, the the black boxes, you can put the black box anywhere in the airplane. Right, but like if it crashed in the middle of the ocean, how would you find it is my my question, like how would they? But it would float and it would have a little, there's things called ELTs or emergency locator transmitters. Okay. There's a bunch of them on the airplane and on impact, those things start going off. And they they've got a battery in them. They'll go off for, you know, 24, 48 hours until the battery runs dead. You would have found the airplane by then. But it's again, it's a more of an expense. The airlines don't want to incur that expense, but and the governments spent what 300, 400, 500 million dollars looking for that airplane? Yeah. But it wasn't any one government. It was a bunch. So it's a long story, but at any rate, that, so the prevailing theories where the captain went off the deep end and

• 59:21Speaker 03

  just kind of took the airplane and did what he did with it. That's one theory. Yeah. I don't put a lot of credence in that. Like that he was suicidal or he was trying to? Or something. He wasn't. Yeah, I guess. But he, he, again, how would, why would you work that whole way to get to that point in your, in your life? Right. Then just to kill a bunch of people. But Air India, you know, I'm, I'm stopping short of saying what, what I think completely happened with that airplane, but it looks like one of the pilots transitioned the fuel control switches from run to cutoff as the airplane rotated. Because the only way for those. What one was this? Air India 171, the, the airplane that, that crashed over in India about six months ago.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Oh, the one where it took off and it just, and then one guy survived, right? Yeah, the one guy walked away. It was just amazing in all in itself. But the one passenger, but the, the, they, they came out with a preliminary report on that and it's the fuel control switches, which are, they're spring loaded into the locked position. You have to pick them up with both fingers, pull them up, bring them down and let go of them for them to turn off. And one of the pilots did that and the other pilot said, why'd you do that? And he said, he denied it. He said, I didn't do it. And then the other pilot is, there's kind of like panics a little bit and then eventually puts them back to run, but it wasn't quick enough to, for the airplane engines to spool up.

• 1:00:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, we know this for a fact now?

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's all in the preliminary report.

• 1:00:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, they published all that. So again, so there's an instance where, you know, was there a pilot deciding he's going to check out that day and he took everybody with him? Okay, well, did that happen on MH370? It's, it's well within the realm of possibility.

• 1:01:02Danny Jones?

  The crazy thing about the MH371 is that they turned off the transponders at like midnight or something like this, around 12:30.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Danny Jones?

  And then it did a U-turn, flew back like over Malaysia, I think. And there was like visual sightings of it, right? And then the military tracked it going back out into the South China Sea, right? Cause it turned off its transponders, but for some reason the military had like some sophisticated way of tracking it and they knew it was there. And then, then the military lost it. But then I guess Boeing, it was determined months later that Boeing has some sophisticated technology that can, that communicates with the engines?

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  Correct. The engines are constantly transmitting back to Boeing.

• 1:01:50Danny Jones?

  To satellites.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  To satellites. Right.

• 1:01:52Danny Jones?

  So these Boeing satellites traced it going, yeah, down like south into the Indian Ocean.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Right. And all those, all that can tell you, because that information that's transmitted to Boeing is not course, speed, altitude, it's none of that stuff. It's just that what parameters are the engines operating? Are they still running? So that they can monitor that stuff constantly. But when you're triangulating where the transmission came from, you can get a rough track of where that airplane went. So the, the, here's, the problem with the way the media reports stuff is, you know. In my opinion, most of the stuff, especially aviation related, is 80 to 90% wrong.

• 1:02:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Completely wrong. They have no idea what they're talking about. And then they'll back off after a while as more facts come in and they finally get it. Maybe they get it 50% right. But everybody clammed onto, um, they turned the transponder off. Stop. The transponder stopped transmitting. That's what happened. So there's a couple of ways for that to happen. The pilot can turn it off. But the one saying the pilots turned it off, that implies a sinister intent. Uh, all we know for sure is that the transponder stopped transmitting. That could have been an onboard fire down in the E and E compartment where all the electronics are. There's no way to put that a fire out down there. There's no fire suppression equipment.

• 1:03:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  It would eventually burn out of control and the transponder would stop transmitting. However, the engines would keep running because they're a separate system. So they're, they don't depend on the gear I have underneath me in the airplane. They'll just keep on running this. It takes a lot to get those jet engines to stop running. As long as they have fuel and air, they'll keep running. So there's a potential that the airplane became what they would call a zombie flight. Right? There was an out of control fire like Swissair 111. Uh, it was a, it was a out of control fire. Everybody on the airplane eventually gets succumbs to the fumes and the, but the airplane keeps flying until it runs out of gas. So that's one of the theories. The other is the captain somehow hijacked the airplane.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  He would have to get rid of his co-pilots or his co-pilot.

• 1:04:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  To do that, but that's not hard to do. And then at some point, you know, he just, he just flies out there and I don't know.

• 1:04:13Danny Jones?

  So yeah, so if there was a fire, basically what you're saying is it could have been, it could have, everyone could have like passed out on the plane. Everyone would have been unconscious and it would have been a ghost plane.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:04:22Danny Jones?

  Just, just flying on its own course until it eventually ran out of gas and crashed into the ocean.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  The hybrid of those two would be, let's say the captain is trying to kill himself and everybody else. So he gets, the co-pilot goes to the bathroom. He locks the door, doesn't let the guy back in. And then he just depressurizes the cabin. He puts himself on oxygen, but depressurizes the cabin. All the, the masks come down in the back. Everybody's got 15 or 20 minutes of oxygen from those, but after that, everybody goes to sleep. Including the co-pilot that's locked out. Everybody goes to sleep and he flies the airplane wherever he wants, thinking about what he's going to think about and

• 1:04:57Danny Jones?

  How much oxygen would he have on that, on that dedicated oxygen?

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  He'd, he'd have, he'd have a bunch. I don't know exactly. It depends on, that's a good question. He'd have more than the passengers would have. Let me put it in that category.

• 1:05:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  Probably not hours worth at that altitude. At some point he'd have to come down to a breathable altitude, but he could bring the airplane down to 10,000 feet and just breathe just fine there. So.

• 1:05:23Danny Jones?

  So we never found the black box? Is that right?

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  They haven't found the airplane or the black boxes.

• 1:05:27Danny Jones?

  Never found the black boxes. But allegedly we found pieces of the airplane.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:31Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 1:05:31Speaker 03

  Washed up some.

• 1:05:32Danny Jones?

  Off Madagascar, the coast of Madagascar. That was like a year and a half later, I think.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  So which leads me to how the airplane entered the water. So if an airplane, you know, crashes, it's, it's going to come apart and leave an oil slick and everything else and all sorts of parts are going to go replace. If it stalled at altitude, it would be going to spin and it would go in much more like a razor's edge into the water, which would mean it probably wouldn't break apart as easily as if it landed flat on the open ocean. Cause there's swells in the ocean and you're going to like hit a wall of water and the airplane's going to disintegrate. But if they went straight in like this.

• 1:06:07Danny Jones?

  It'd penetrate.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  Right? So if, if the airplane just ran out of gas, everybody was dead. It ran out of gas. It eventually would stall. It would start a tight spin and it would go right straight down. So those are, you know, those are my theories on what happened to it. But, you know, there's, you know, there's probably a dozen more.

• 1:06:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah. The best one is the UFOs abducted it and made it vanish.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah. These UFO, UFOs made it, uh, trapped, uh, sent it through a wormhole, wormhole portal.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. See, I get asked that question all the time. Like I was, one of the things I did as a captain was I would ask people, I'd say, hey, if you ever had a question you wanted to ask your captain, this is your lucky flight. Write it down on a napkin or a piece of paper. Send it up to me. I'll answer your questions.

• 1:06:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  So about every 10th question was, have you ever seen a UFO? And I, I had the same answer. I'd write back every time. I'd say, not from the outside. And I'd just leave it at that. And I'd send it back to them, you know?

• 1:07:00Danny Jones?

  Not from the outside?

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Not from the outside.

• 1:07:02Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  That's all I would say.

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  Not from the outside.

• 1:07:06Danny Jones?

  And the second one is the Earth flat, right?

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  And is the Earth flat?

• 1:07:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, so the Earth flat one is fun because there's a couple of theories on that. It's the, is it the round Earth flat or the square Earth flat theory? There's, there's two.

• 1:07:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, there's two?

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  Well, if it's square, then the moon going around the Earth has to make 90 degree turns. So we have to consider that.

• 1:07:28Danny Jones?

  Oh shit, okay.

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  That's, that's a big deal. Now, if it's a round, like a plate, you know, like a round plate, then okay, the moon's cool with that. But I think if the, if the Earth was flat, first of all, the cats would have pushed all of us off the edge at some point. That's number, that's the top of my theory. But the other is, where are the flat mooners? You ever heard of flat moon?

• 1:07:52Danny Jones?

  I've never heard of, I've heard, I've heard, uh, the moon is a spaceship. I've heard that theory. The problem with these theories are like, you gotta be really careful. Because if you're a proponent of one, you gotta be careful before you jump on the bandwagon for another one, because that one can disprove the one that you've already been a part of. So like, you can't start saying like, the moon's a spaceship if you believe in flat Earth. Because how, how does those, those two don't reconcile? The moon can't be real if you're believing in flat Earth. It's gotta be like some sort of projection, right? Oh, this is the UFO for the MH370.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's right up there with all the other theories.

• 1:08:28Danny Jones?

  Um, and you guys actually have to, uh, you guys have to fly in like curves, curvatures, right? To like, get places?

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was so strange. So it's, it's called the great circle. And so the, the Earth is a globe. It's round. Wait, I gave it away. Sorry. It's, it's, it's round and a globe. And if you, if you were to draw, take a piece of yarn from New York to Los Angeles on, on a globe, and then flatten out the globe, your, your piece of yarn would be, it would be bent.

• 1:09:04Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  So to fly straight to someplace on a globe, it looks like on a two dimensional flat surface, like you're going up and down like this, you're not, you're actually going straight.

• 1:09:15Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  When you see a straight line, like if I do a straight line from New York to London.

• 1:09:19Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  On, on a map, I would actually be going much farther out of my way to get there. Because to do, to do it straight is not straight because it's round and you're flattening out. It blew my mind years ago when I had to learn it and I just kind of punted mentally on it and said, yep, sounds good.

• 1:09:38Danny Jones?

  It sounds good, yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, just give me enough gas, I'll get there.

• 1:09:41Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Yeah, and that's why we have to fly like over the North Pole or over like the top of the earth to get to places like, like Europe or whatever. You don't fly over the ocean, just like sideways, you go above.

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:09:51Danny Jones?

  It's a shorter distance.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Looking at a flat map, you go, well, the shortest distance is here. Well, not necessarily. Sometimes if you go this way, it's shorter than going this way.

• 1:09:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Danny Jones?

  So is there, speaking of UFOs, is there a protocol if you do see an unidentified flying object?

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  I'm sure there's probably something in a manual someplace that says.

• 1:10:11Danny Jones?

  Even if it's not, I'm not talking aliens, I'm like anything, like anything that you can't identify.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  You would just kind of call it in, you'd say, hey, you know, there's an object out here and it's making a light and what is it? And does air traffic control have it on their radar? And if they say no, you go, well, here's what I'm looking at. There's lots of things that can, that can make a light that this, it fools your brain. Going up the, the east coast of Canada on the way over to Europe, all those North Star satellites are up there now. And they, they actually light up and, and it's really weird looking at them because they're all kind of in a line, but sometimes one lights up and the other and it looks like it's hopping around.

• 1:10:50Danny Jones?

  Huh.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  You know, but it's just the way the sun is hitting one and then hits another at this, and it looks like the same. Your brain goes, there's, there can only be one light up there because of all the stars, you know, that star's not going to move. Well, but that one is, it's hopping around like this. It's just, it's just a different satellites.

• 1:11:07Danny Jones?

  You know what I'm thinking right now? We need to show him the video that we shot on the beach.

• 1:11:12Speaker 04

  Oh, this, yes, that'd be fantastic. Love your input.

• 1:11:16Danny Jones?

  Okay. So we had this gentleman on the show about two years ago. Who has this wild ability to pray to the sky and make orbs appear? And he said that he could do it in front of us. Okay, so we went to the beach, we brought a video camera and he started praying to God on the beach and to Jesus to bring these orbs. He believes they're angels. And we sat there for two hours. We saw airplanes, lots of airplanes. And then we saw this orb, this little ball of light come up off the horizon and go side to side and then fizzle out. Kind of like, like how you, kind of how you would imagine like one of those Chinese lanterns that float around in the sky, but it was too far and it was too bright and the brightness changed.

• 1:12:01Danny Jones?

  But you're a pilot, so this would be a fantastic opportunity to get your take on what this could be.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, sure.

• 1:12:09Danny Jones?

  So this is the video. It's, it's, this is dark, so start from the beginning, Steve.

• 1:12:12Speaker 05

  Do that one more time.

• 1:12:13Danny Jones?

  So that's a plane flashing up there, right?

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:12:16Danny Jones?

  Now look at the bottom.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  There's something right on the water, right on the water. Thank you, thank you. If you could flash for us and.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  I'm getting it.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  Right there. It's still in the camera. It's still in here.

• 1:12:39Danny Jones?

  And it just disappears. Now look at this one moving.

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  Oh. Here, someone needs to look through this. It's, it's very bright. Thank you. Oh, you see it? It's right there. You see it? That is definitely an orb. I'm, I'm tracking it here. Do you want to look?

• 1:12:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah, can you still see it?

• 1:13:03Danny Jones?

  I lost it.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  All right, so a couple of things. I spent a lot of time in my P3 out over the open ocean, right? That's what we did. We flew around at 200 feet. So you get, you get pretty good at nighttime, daytime, differentiating between something that's on the surface of the water and an actual star or a planet that's, you know, gazillion miles away. Cause you don't want to confuse the two. There's been airplanes that have flown into the water thinking it was open sky and it was actually something on the surface.

• 1:13:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  So you gotta be real careful about that. But there's a thing called parallax and parallax is always like right over the top of the water. And at night, for instance, when the moon first comes up, this is your, it's not a brain thing. It's, it's because of the. The way the, um, I don't know how to describe it. Um, the, the way light is transmitted just off the surface of the, of the planet at a distance, you'll see the moon come up and you'll go, that's gigantic. It's a, the moon is like so much closer than it ever was before.

• 1:14:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  And eventually as it goes up into the sky, it goes back to a normal sized moon.

• 1:14:07Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  And you're like, why was it so big there? It's the, it's, it magnifies it because it's a parallax. So any sort of light that's off at a distance, a boat's got a light, boats have red, green and white lights, just like airplanes. And you got it and it gets in that parallax, it's right on the horizon. It gets real big and then, and then it goes away because the boat turned and the light's not there anymore. So there's, there's lots of explanations for that. My, the, the theoretical side of all of the UFO things for me is it's always, it's always just out of touch. Whatever it is.

• 1:14:41Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  It's always just beyond our comprehension or just beyond our reach. And it, it showed up on the horizon for just a split second and oh, it went away. And the guy had been talking to you about orbs and he, he put planted that seed near mine and, and she goes, it's, it is, there it is. It's an orb. And your brain goes, oh, there's only one explanation for this now. This guy's a, he's a miracle worker and he prayed to Jesus.

• 1:15:04Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  To validate the whole thing. I mean, what could be more validating than that?

• 1:15:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  Well, he takes all of those things, plants all those seeds in your mind. And eventually some boat is going to shine its light. It's going to be in that parallax. It's going to get real big and bright for a minute and then it's going to go away.

• 1:15:20Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  Um, I've seen stuff like that hundreds of times.

• 1:15:23Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  And it's always some surface vessel that's got a light on.

• 1:15:27Danny Jones?

  Okay. And it was, we were using a special camera, like a night vision camera, like a, um.

• 1:15:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, it was a high, uh, sensitivity camera.

• 1:15:36Danny Jones?

  So, yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  And a recorder.

• 1:15:38Danny Jones?

  And I don't mean to squash anything. If you wanted to be an orb, it sounds great. No, I don't want it to be, I want it to, I don't, I'm, I'm, I was just generally dumbfounded by what it could be. And I've been trying to figure it out for two years.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  Chicks dig that stuff. You know, and you can say, oh.

• 1:15:50Danny Jones?

  I don't need chicks.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  I saw the orb.

• 1:15:53Danny Jones?

  That's, that's wow. So, so you think it could have been boats?

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:15:57Danny Jones?

  Okay. Yeah. It was very low to the, to the horizon. So that, that is definitely possible.

• 1:16:02Speaker 06

  But what about the woman that popped up like, uh, above it?

• 1:16:07Danny Jones?

  So that one, there was one above it?

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Danny Jones?

  Okay, there's a one on the bottom.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you get your line right there and that.

• 1:16:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that could definitely be about.

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  Probably some distance and it's in that parallax. It's probably a very small light, but it's been.

• 1:16:18Danny Jones?

  It could be a cop, but with this lights flashing.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  And the second one's even farther.

• 1:16:23Danny Jones?

  It could be farther away.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  Even farther away.

• 1:16:25Danny Jones?

  Where's the horizon? I can't see the horizon.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Right, but it looks like that that's where the horizon is, but it's probably not.

• 1:16:31Danny Jones?

  I see what he's saying.

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  Or it could be, it could be another airplane. It's moving pretty fast.

• 1:16:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:16:39Danny Jones?

  But that could definitely be boats. I don't know why I didn't think of that.

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  Could be a UFO too.

• 1:16:45Danny Jones?

  Could be aliens.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  Could be aliens.

• 1:16:46Danny Jones?

  Might be aliens.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Danny Jones?

  That thing got bright though.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:16:52Danny Jones?

  It was astonishing to me how many planes were coming, because I never sat outside and watched the sky for that long. It was astonishing how many planes were coming into land off the, off the fricking coast. It was crazy. There must have been like 200 planes we saw, like that were coming into land off the coast.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Was that in Miami?

• 1:17:09Danny Jones?

  No, that was right here.

• 1:17:10Speaker 03

  Oh, right here.

• 1:17:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right, right, right. Like literally right on the beach, right there.

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:17:14Danny Jones?

  Tampa Airport.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's lots of explanations for that, but you know, it's.

• 1:17:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Have you heard um, the Navy pilots talk about those, those things that they were seeing when they were doing their training off of, off North Carolina and off San Diego? What did you make of that stuff?

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  I, you know, again, I wasn't there, so it's hard to say. Again, the, the bigger picture on those things are, it's always grainy video.

• 1:17:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  It's always just kind of out of reach. It, it happens so quickly. You can hardly tell what it is. It's never, you know, I mean, if you're in, if you were a superior being from hundreds or thousands of light years away and you traveled all the way here, don't you want somebody to see your spaceship? Or marvel at your technology, you know, and why is it that they always crash in Roswell, New Mexico? I don't understand that.

• 1:18:09Danny Jones?

  Ah.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Maybe it has something to do with the local economy or something.

• 1:18:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  Again, there's, you know, there's probably a lot of different explanations for this. I, I love this one because it's very convincing. It's got the, he's got his FLIR radar on at night and he's doing the infrared stuff.

• 1:18:23Danny Jones?

  So this is coming off of a plane that's flying in one direction over the water. And it's locked on something flying the opposite direction, which making it, makes it look like it's going like a bajillion miles an hour.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:18:34Danny Jones?

  So there's definitely a parallax element involved in this video where that could, I've heard the case of that could actually be like a bird or something, something normal.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  Or it's, if you see, it's completely stationary on the scope. Those scopes don't lock on like that. Like it doesn't, doesn't move. What that tells me is that's probably something on the lens. Like you'll get, you'll get floaters in your eye that'll, you actually see something that's not really out there in front of me. It's on your eyeball. That could be something else. I don't know. I don't know enough about how that technology works to. But it's, it stays perfectly right there the whole time.

• 1:19:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  It doesn't, it doesn't move around a lot. You know, like the camera would be looking for it, like your eyeball would be looking, the camera does the same thing. It's trying to lock on. It's

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  so I don't know. Maybe it's bird droppings on.

• 1:19:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's definitely a lot of weird stuff. Stuff. I mean, I know that fighter pilots, they have to be pretty mentally sound.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  Oh, they do.

• 1:19:32Danny Jones?

  I'm sure they have to go through probably the same amount of, maybe not, I would imagine they would have similar standards and requirements like to physicals and mental health and stuff like that for commercial pilots like yourself.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, there's guys that are into this sort of thing and it's, there's nothing wrong with them mentally. I mean, sometimes it's like a hobby or a pursuit. I flew with a guy once, an airline pilot that was into a thing called a course in miracles. And a course in miracles is not a course like you would take a college course. It's an actual religion. And, and it's a, it's the, it's the nth degree of existentialism. It's the, the idea that everything going on around us, we don't even know whether we exist or if this is reality or what is reality.

• 1:20:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  So this guy didn't know whether he was alive or not, what reality was. And we talked for four hours. We were coming back from Los Angeles to Boston. He told me all about what he believed.

• 1:20:29Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  And, and I was fascinated by it, a little concerned at the same time, but fascinated. And, but he, he said, this could be a giant movie playing in front of us right now and we're just all part of that movie that's playing. And I thought, okay, well, as long as your part includes lowering the flaps in the gear before we, we touched down, I'm good. I'm good with that. And he did. He lowered the flaps in the gear and I was good.

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• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Mmm, with the conclusion of that movie, but he was 100% convinced that he wasn't sure whether he existed or not.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  And he passed all his tests and all his check rates.

• 1:22:05Danny Jones?

  Did that guy have to blow Russellizer before getting on that plane?

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  No, he wasn't drunk. He was, he was totally into what he believed. And so the mind is capable of comprehending a lot of things.

• 1:22:14Danny Jones?

  There are certain, there are certain substances that can enhance that, but don't necessarily, you don't have to be under the influence while you're.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:22:22Danny Jones?

  They can enhance it like long-term.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25Danny Jones?

  Or change your perspectives, blow your perspectives on reality out of the water.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:22:29Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  I've heard such things.

• 1:22:32Danny Jones?

  I bet you've had some very interesting conversations flying planes.

• 1:22:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've done a lot of counseling at 37,000 feet.

• 1:22:40Danny Jones?

  So, um, I've heard that, is it true that when you are?

• 1:22:50Danny Jones?

  Making a trip on a plane, that the most dangerous point of the trip is when you're taking off?

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:22:56Danny Jones?

  The first, I think, like 20 minutes when you're trying to get into crew to like the cruising altitude.

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  Takeoff in general is the, is the most dangerous part of the flight because you're the heaviest you're ever going to be, you're the slowest you're going to be, you've got the power pushed all the way up.

• 1:23:14Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  And so you don't have a lot of extra power to grab a hold of if you need it. And now you do have a little bit, you've got a little bit of a margin, but not the way you would when you were landing, landing, you've got to, you have burned off a bunch of your fuel. You're, you're still slow, but you've got your flaps out and so forth, but the power's basically pulled all the way back to idle. So if you need those engines, you're just going to push them up. So that's the difference between landing and taking off. Taking off is the most precarious because your, your, your thrust is all the way up and you're the heaviest you're ever going to be. So if you're going to have a problem and it's like, I just did a video, it went out two days ago on United, 803 took off out of, I don't remember where it was now, it

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  was Denver, one of those airports, but they, they took off and they had a engine failure between V1 and rotate, which is the go no-go speed on the runway. So you have to, if you lose an engine after V1, you must go flying. You don't have enough concrete in front of you to stop the airplane.

• 1:24:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  So it's the worst possible place to lose an engine. They lost an engine, they rotated. It was out of Dulles, they took off, they, they lit the, the side of the runway on fire because of some of the debris that went over into the dry grass. And these guys did an absolute masterclass in how to get an airplane off the ground with a single engine at full gross weight. They were going to Tokyo.

• 1:24:41Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  That was as heavy as a triple seven gets.

• 1:24:44Danny Jones?

  From Dulles?

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  From Dulles, all the way to Tokyo, 6,000 mile trip. That's as heavy as it gets. They lost the engine at the worst possible spot. And just like they're training, I get trained in this every nine months. So they fail an engine on the runway at max gross weight. And you have to get that airplane airborne. So they're, they're climbing out and they're doing a great job. The, the air traffic controller is asking them for information. You know, tell us about this, tell us about it. Finally, the pilot just goes, um, I'll get back to you. I'm busy.

• 1:25:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, because they're doing checklists?

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're doing, he's trying to fly the airplane.

• 1:25:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  It's a real thin margin, but the airplane will fly fine on one engine. But you don't want to stall it. You don't want to get too slow, but you still got to continue to climb. So there it's, it takes the skills of a guy that's been around for that many years to fly that airplane safely out. And they did, did it right by the book. It was a brilliant rendition of how that should go.

• 1:25:37Danny Jones?

  And they were able to turn it around and land it?

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yep. They got the airplane up to altitude. They got all their checklist done, did all their communicating. They even dumped fuel to lighten ship a little bit. When they touched down, they blew a tire.

• 1:25:47Danny Jones?

  Over the ocean?

• 1:25:48Speaker 03

  No, it was up over Dulles. They were over Washington DC.

• 1:25:51Danny Jones?

  What do you mean when you say dump fuel?

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  So the center fuel tank, you can get rid of the fuel in that. You can dump it out the ends of the wings. So if you're overweight and you need to lighten ship a little bit, you can, you can jettison fuel. So they, they had to activate the fuel jettison system. It takes 20, 25 minutes to get rid of all the center section fuel. But you're going to lighten the airplane maybe by a hundred thousand pounds.

• 1:26:13Danny Jones?

  And they just release it into the air?

• 1:26:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you go above 5,000 feet and it dissipates into the air.

• 1:26:18Danny Jones?

  Oh, does it really?

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  Right. So there's a hard altitude for that. You don't want to do it below 5,000 because.

• 1:26:22Danny Jones?

  Make it rain.

• 1:26:23Speaker 03

  It, yeah, it's.

• 1:26:24Danny Jones?

  That wouldn't be good.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  As they say in, in the UK, it's, it's, um, frightfully bad formal check to do that.

• 1:26:32Danny Jones?

  That's crazy. I was once flying in, um, I flew on this really tiny airplane, uh, to the Bahamas. And, um, it was like, uh, there was, it was enough to fit the pilot, the, my person sitting next to the pilot. And then two people directly behind it. And we were like flying really low over Florida. And we were just having this conversation about like all the worst things that could happen right now. Like in this plane and we're flying like over Okeechobee or whatever. And I'm like, what would happen if like, what's the worst thing that could happen right now? And he's like, I don't know, I'll lose both my engines. And I'm like, really? I'm like, does that not freak you out? And he's like, no. And he was explaining to me like how he's already like in his mind, he's constantly processing

• 1:27:15Danny Jones?

  where he can land in an emergency, how he would land it, all that. So he's like, I got that highway there. I got that highway there. I got that big, empty farmland over there. And he's like, just constantly hyper processing, like what would, what worst case scenario would be? And that got me thinking like, okay, now I can understand why some of these people are like not, you know, they're not like fully mentally like stable. Like if you're constantly in this hyper vigilant state all the time, like I can imagine that can't be healthy.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  Well, it goes back, it's part of your training. So when you first started flying before you even got that first solo or anything out of the way, you were flying a single engine airplane, most like a little Cessna. And you had a single engine. If that failed, you had to put it down someplace. So the first instructor you had, you got airborne and the instructor said, start looking, keep your head on a swivel, keep looking out for a place you can put this airplane down if you need to. And that gets ingrained in you in those early days. Then you get into a two-engine airplane and you're still kind of doing the same thing, right?

• 1:28:16Danny Jones?

  Now, this thing was probably a one-engine, now that I think of it.

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, a single-engine airplane, your head's on a swivel all the time. Because if you lose your one and only engine, you're gonna have to put it down in a farmer's field, on the beach, on a road, someplace. So you're, I've got my own airplane now and it's a single-engine airplane. I hadn't flown a single-engine in 30-plus years. And as I was flying it back from where I bought it, I had that same nervousness back when I was a young pilot. I'm sitting there the whole time, just on edge, doing like this, you know, like, okay, I can put it down there, I can put it down there. And I thought, oh, I haven't lived like this for a long time. Right? Because the 777 is so reliable. I'm not sitting up there the whole time thinking, where am I gonna put this airplane down? You know, I'm gonna fly to some major airport.

• 1:28:56Danny Jones?

  There's always so many crazy stories about single-engine airplanes in Florida. I feel like every day in the news, you get some crazy, wacky story.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a bunch of them.

• 1:29:04Danny Jones?

  There was an interview I watched with this pro golfer, a young, I think it was a younger dude. And this was on a pod, he was on, went on somebody's podcast and he was explaining how he went golfing with Donald Trump at, when I had the, one of the, I think it was the golf course in West Palm. And they're like sitting there like in the golf carts or whatever. And all of a sudden, like Trump's security comes rushing over to him. He's like, Mr. President, uh, there's, there's a situation. We need to get you off the golf course. And he's like, what? And apparently like this all happened so fast. All of a sudden, these like fighter jets came in right above them. And there was this little single engine Cessna flying over the golf course.

• 1:29:46Danny Jones?

  And I guess there's some crazy protocol where wherever the president is, there has to be a no fly zone around him. And there was this like old guy in like his seventies or eighties, maybe. I don't know how old he was, flying his single engine plane really low, right above the golf course where they're playing golf. And these fricking fighter jets come in on both sides of it.

• 1:30:06Danny Jones?

  And it happens all so quick. And he's like this kid, this golfer, this pro golfer who's explaining this to these people on the podcast. He goes, he goes, Donald Trump looked at me and he goes, that's power.

• 1:30:19Danny Jones?

  It's like, God, can you imagine? That's so crazy.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's how addictive that power gets, you know? Every place the president goes, there's a, there's a prohibited area and they'll put it out on a, on a notum, a notice to airmen. And then that's why you have to check your notes before you go flying, but you can't fly in that. Nobody can fly in that area, wherever he is.

• 1:30:39Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I couldn't imagine, I just couldn't imagine being the poor guy in the Cessna when there's two, there's four fighter jets pull up on both sides of you.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, you would, you would soil your pants.

• 1:30:49Danny Jones?

  Oh my God. Yeah. So like for you, what was your personal, like, what was like the hairiest moment you've ever been in, in an airplane?

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  Um, I've, I've had two, uh, the, not with the airlines. Airlines are pretty mundane and very regimented. But it doesn't mean they couldn't have happened, but I, I, back in the Navy days, I was, um, the first one. Was we were doing workups to go on deployment. So six month deployment, the six weeks before you go on deployment, you go out and you practice like you're gonna play for real and you put bombs on the wings and fill the airplane up with gas and go do missions off the coast.

• 1:31:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  So it was really bad weather. We were up in Brunswick, Maine, and a nor'easter was coming through and we were still trying to get this mission done. So we got out to the operating area, it took us about 45 minutes. We, the weather was so bad, we couldn't get anything done. So we aborted the mission and came back. So now the airplane is really pretty full of gas still. I didn't, you know, the four hours I was supposed to be out there, I didn't burn all that gas off. So I come back and the weather has deteriorated from where we left. And I'm thinking, you know, I just want to go home, right? So we try and approach and we come down and, and we had to wave off because we didn't get the runway and we came back a second time and the, the wind was whipping 90 degrees off the runway. It was within the limits of the airplane, but it was really blowing hard and the rain, like

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

  just buckets of rain. And the top, the surface of the, the runway, the wind was blowing so hard, there was like little bubbles in the water. It was, it was blowing that hard.

• 1:32:20Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  So we got the airplane down, we touched down, I brought the four engines on that airplane, I brought all four engines into reverse and we were hydroplaning. But I didn't know it. You don't know you're hydroplaning until you go to touch the brakes. And so I tried to bring it in reverse and the airplane starts sliding sideways because the wind is blowing us that way. And I'm like, holy moly, we're not, we're sliding. So I brought him out of reverse and I hit the brakes. When I hit the brakes, nothing happened. It was like a cheesy Saturday afternoon movie where they cut the brake lines, you know, and the guy's hitting the brakes, you know? And I'm, I'm pounding the brakes and nothing. And so we're not slowing down. And I tried bringing it reverse again. We lost about another 50 feet and we're just about off the side of the runway. So don't do that again. My co-pilot,

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  God bless him, we were at, we had 2,000 feet of runway left in front of us and he yells out to me, he goes, 2,000 feet remaining. And I looked at my airspeed and I'm doing about 110 knots still. And I touched down at about 125. So I've, I've lost 15. Knots in that in all the runway we've burned up and I'm like, oh, man. And so I'm thinking we're going off the end of the runway. It was black pitch black night out. We had bombs on the wings, full of gas. So I remember having that fleeting thought of, okay, when we come to a stop off the end of the runway, if I'm still alive, how am I going to get out of this airplane? Like I went through a real quick inventory of the three ways to get out of the airplane. And then I just threw up an arrow prayer. I just said, God, help stop this airplane.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  And I think I even said it out loud and I I hit the brakes one last time. And at the far end of the runway, I guess it was dry enough that the brakes took. Now, so the airplane is like a giant tricycle, right? It's got a nose gear and two main mounts. So we're sideways because of the wind. So this tricycle is sideways. And when I hit the brakes and they took, the airplane started to hop. You know? And so it's like bam bam bam bam bam. And we're coming to the end of the runway and I'm like, I'm going to go off the end of this runway. So I grabbed the nose wheel, the little tillers off to my left. And there was a taxiway that went this way. And I just grabbed it and pulled it for as much as I could to get that a little bit of nose wheel action going that way. And we stopped.

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  And the the engines are turning like that and the wind is blowing against it and the airplane shaking. And I looked and the nose of the airplane was off the end of the runway. But the the front main tire was behind us a little bit. That's where it says it was actually still on the pavement. So we it was a 10,000 foot runway and we used up 9,999 of it.

• 1:34:56Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 1:34:58Speaker 03

  Yep. So we we stopped on the runway. And now the guys behind in the back, they have no clue what's going on. They're just along for the ride, right? So there's four of us up in the cockpit. So it was one of those moments where we all took our headsets off and put them in our laps because we're all just like, you know? And eventually one of the guys in the back comes like, hey, Flight, are we going to taxi off and get rid of these bombs? And I'm like, I'm like, yeah, just give us a minute. And then the tower called, hey, you guys, okay? Yep, yep, we're okay. We're just having a moment, you know, just we'll be with you. So we taxied off, we got rid of the bombs. I went to get, I went to get out of my seat and my knees were knocking so bad I couldn't stand up. And it's hard to describe that feeling.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  I'm looking at my legs and they're doing like this inside my my flight suit. And I'm like, okay. And that was the adrenaline let down. So that was, that was number one. The other one was very similar. I was flying students around one day in a, in a King Air twin-engine airplane and we had a, the rudder got stuck and the airplane started to kind of go over at about 20 feet and it's counterintuitive, but if you pull the power back off the opposite engine, the airplane will right itself and I did. I don't know why I did, but I did. And, and the airplane righted itself. We came around, I slammed on the brakes and the same, same reaction. My knees are just knocking so bad. And the students had no idea what was going on. They're totally clueless at that point. I'm like, oh, you know. So I, after

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  that second one, I, I went up to my ops chief. This was a Monday and I, I told him what happened. I said, I'm, I'm, don't put me on the schedule until next Monday. I said, I need to go have a week and just reflect. And he looked at me and said, okay, just let me know when you want to come back. It didn't come off my leave or sick or anything. I just had to have a mental health week and I came back the next Monday. I said, I'm good to go.

• 1:36:44Danny Jones?

  That's good. You need to have the mental health.

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  Sometimes you just gotta reflect on your life choices.

• 1:36:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, totally, man. Yeah, it is, uh,

• 1:36:55Danny Jones?

  it's funny. I don't know if it's funny, but it's interesting how even the most devout atheists will find God on an airplane when, when there's turbulence or when something goes south. I even saw, um, this morning I was watching just some random stuff on YouTube and there was a, which I don't know if this is a good idea or not. You could probably allude to this better than me, but uh, the pilot got on the, on the comms and he was like, everyone, please, please pray.

• 1:37:20Speaker 03

  No, that's, that's not a good thing.

• 1:37:23Danny Jones?

  And, uh, it was a, it was a, it was some airline over in India or not India, somewhere over there in that part of the world. And something happened with the engine where the plane was rattling like a, like a, um, like a closed drying machine for like an hour and a half and they had to land it. Something was wrong with the engines and he was telling everyone to pray.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that might, you gotta know your culture and that might work.

• 1:37:47Danny Jones?

  Maybe, and yeah, maybe in a different culture.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  Back in the day when I was training students, um, back in the early nineties, we had Saudi Arabian students that came over and they're all Muslim and those guys, we'd get up in the airplane and we would give them emergencies on purpose as part of the training and we'd, we'd fail an engine, not fail it, but pull the power back on it. And to a person, they'd start praying. And so you had, you had to work them through that. And I'd say, you know, Mohammed, or whatever the guy's name was, I'd say, we're going to go up today. I'm going to fail an engine on you. Uh, I'd be more than happy to pray with you when we get back down on the ground.

• 1:38:19Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  But I will give you a down. I will fail you if the first thing you do is start praying. I need you to do your emergency procedures. And it was about 50 50. These guys had stopped. They'd get, they'd get in a panic and they, their first reflex was to pray. They go, this is not a time to pray. This is a time to do step one, step two, step three, as you memorize them and, and fly the airplane. And, and the guys, they would get over it, but they're, the part of the training was to get them over their initial impulse, you know, either to scream or to, to, you know, just kind of have tunnel vision or to pray in their case. And they get, they did. They'd eventually get through the training and, and, you know, they're good to go.

• 1:38:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's a weird thing.

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  There's a time for praying and there's a

• 1:38:59Danny Jones?

  There's definitely not a, definitely when you're flying an airplane, it's not a time to pray.

• 1:39:04Speaker 03

  No, it's a, you can pray afterwards.

• 1:39:05Danny Jones?

  If you're in charge of flying the airplane at least.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  Or if you got 2000 feet remaining, you're still at 110 knots, throw up a little prayer. That worked for me.

• 1:39:11Danny Jones?

  Oh my God. Yeah. In your own head, not, not on the comm speakers.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

• 1:39:18Danny Jones?

  So here's my question. If something is going south and you're piloting a plane with, you know, a couple of hundred people, passengers onboard, how do you know when to communicate shit and when not to communicate stuff?

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  Well, I tried to put myself in the position of a passenger in the back of the airplane. Right? So you're trained from day one, like that head on the swivel thing. You're also trained, aviate, navigate, communicate in that order. Fly the airplane first. That's your first priority. Then get to where you're going, navigate. That's your second priority. The third one is communicate. So you saw that, that flight out of Dulles with that triple seven crew, they finally got fed up trying to answer questions and he just said, I'm busy. Right? Leave me alone. Right? I'll get back to you when I can. That's the least of my priorities. So same thing with the passengers. You do want to let them in on what's going on. And I think people appreciate honesty. Now there's, there's varying degrees of honesty. You know, you can be totally blunt and

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  And have that shaky voice and go, I don't know what's gonna happen. You don't want to share that level of honesty. What you do want to be is reassuring. Most pilots are pretty good at it. And just tell people what's going on. Hey, folks, we've got the right engine. We've had to shut it down. Here's what happened. The airplane flies just fine on one engine. It does at all gross weights. We're going to come back to the airport. We just took off from. We're going to land. It's going to take about 25 minutes. I have a couple of checklists to get through. Please follow the instructions of your flight attendants. That's all you need to let them know. And most people will be reassured. They heard from the guy in charge, and they feel reassured by that. He cares about you, and that he or she is in charge, and they've got it under control. Right? That's very reassuring, especially if you're a nervous flyer.

• 1:40:57Speaker 03

  No, it just kind of comes.

• 1:41:00Danny Jones?

  It comes with the job.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:41:02Danny Jones?

  Because I imagine there's got to be certain folks, maybe from like, the northeastern United States, who aren't that great of sugar, sugar coating stuff.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, I mean, there's all sorts. We have all sorts of different personalities.

• 1:41:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've run into them. Some do it better than others.

• 1:41:19Danny Jones?

  So is, is turbulence ever dangerous?

• 1:41:25Speaker 03

  Turbulence is annoying. It can be dangerous, but there's, we just released a course called Conquering Your Fear of Flying. And in that course, we talk about overcoming your fear of turbulence, because that's kind of like the number one thing. People don't like when the airplane starts to bounce. So there's light, moderate, and severe turbulence. You're not allowed to be dispatched through severe turbulence. If it's known, they can't fly you through it. You have to go around it. Or don't go flying. Now, moderate and light, yeah, all the time, right? The airplane is not going to come apart. It's not. It's just completely over engineered for that. If you think about turbulence, like the current in a river, or water currents, when it's nice and smooth, it's like you're on the lake. There's just no currents. But you

• 1:42:09Speaker 03

  start going down the river, and the current picks up a little bit in speed. So you start getting into some light turbulence. And it's kind of annoying, but it's no dangerous to you. The moderate turbulence are like the whitewater rafting. You know, you're kind of holding on to the armrest, and you're holding on to your drink, and you're going through the whitewater.

• 1:42:25Danny Jones?

  You could capsize.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  You could in a boat, right? In the water, you drown in the water, but you're in an airplane. It's not going to capsize. It's not going to turn over. It's going to bounce. It's going to make you feel uncomfortable, but the wings aren't going to come off the airplane. It's again, they're not nearly as dense as the water is. It's just air currents. But like anything else, when there's converging currents that come in together, like the jet stream is going this way and something else is going that way, it's going to cause bumps. Um, I try to avoid it just for the comfort level for the passengers, but there's no danger to the airplane at all. No danger. It's not dangerous at all. It's just annoying in the back and it makes you nervous. That's reassuring. Right. And the other thing is. The hell's this? He's going to show me all the Aloha air.

• 1:43:08Speaker 04

  He said that planes are going to come apart and this image popped up in my brain.

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah. No Aloha. I don't remember this. Yeah, that was, that was a corrosion issue that they had with those airplanes and, and that whole, because of the pressurization. What is that? Those are all the seats. They, like three people. Is that plane on the ground? No, they were airborne. How did they get that photo? I don't know. It's probably Photoshop. That's gotta be AI. That's on the ground. The other one was in the, in the sky that you were just showing, Steve. Yeah, that's probably Photoshop. On the, yeah, that one. Yeah, that's, that's the ground photo. See the guy standing? Yeah. Somebody put it in the air. They put it in the air. I see. So what, what was the story with this? So it was a corrosion issue and, and, uh, they had a, um, the, basically the airplane

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  is pressurized from the inside and, uh, i- if, if something starts to give way, it'll, it'll rip and it ripped the whole top of that Aloha jet off. Whoa. That's a 737, but look, all that damage and the airplane still flew. Did everyone survive? I think three people died. I think there, one row of passengers was like sucked out. Cause they weren't wearing their seat belts? Well, that's why I tell people, keep your seatbelt fastened.

• 1:44:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Right, that's the worst

• 1:44:19Danny Jones?

  I never buckle my seatbelt.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  That's the worst case example of that. But, but, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna convert you here.

• 1:44:26Danny Jones?

  I always, I always go like this when they're walking by, so they can't see if I'm wearing my seatbelt or not.

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  Why do you do that? Why do you do that? Cause look above you, 12 inches, 18 inches above you is a hard surface.

• 1:44:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:44:37Speaker 03

  So you're probably not gonna get sucked out of the airplane like that. That's a one in a billion shot. What's gonna happen is you're gonna be in some turbulence that, that pops up that fast and you're gonna come out of that seat, hit that overhead, break your neck and that's it.

• 1:44:50Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  And you know, and you know how much liability the air, the, um, the airline is under?

• 1:44:56Danny Jones?

  Zero.

• 1:44:56Speaker 03

  Zero, because that seatbelt sign was on and I probably came on and told you to fasten your seatbelt. And if you unbuckled it, that's on you.

• 1:45:04Danny Jones?

  I'm converted.

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:45:05Danny Jones?

  So let me ask you this.

• 1:45:08Danny Jones?

  Where is the best safest seat on the airplane for somebody?

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  Your couch at home, there isn't one.

• 1:45:14Danny Jones?

  Really? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure depending on how the plane, if, if a plane crashes.

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  No two plane crashes are the same.

• 1:45:22Danny Jones?

  Right, that's true.

• 1:45:22Speaker 03

  It's hard to, to run the numbers on that. Some people will say the back of the airplane because the front of the airplane takes the impact.

• 1:45:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:45:29Speaker 03

  Some people will say what 11A, cause that guy in Air India walked away, he was in 11A.

• 1:45:34Danny Jones?

  In India?

• 1:45:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he, he just, uh,

• 1:45:37Danny Jones?

  Next to the exit?

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  So he was right in the leading edge of the wing, right where the back of that, the damage is right there.

• 1:45:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Speaker 03

  There's a thing called the wing spar and the wing spar is the heaviest, hardest part of the airplane. It's like a big old I-beam that goes from one wing to the other.

• 1:45:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:45:51Speaker 03

  And he was right behind that, so they think that, that wing spar took most of the impact that he would have taken. And then he's a pretty big, strong guy.

• 1:46:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:00Speaker 03

  He just got lucky.

• 1:46:02Danny Jones?

  Good lord.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  He just did. You know, the fireball and everything else, how did he walk out of all that?

• 1:46:08Danny Jones?

  I have to use the restroom real quick.

• 1:46:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:10Danny Jones?

  We'll take a quick five minute break. Have you ever heard of the summer of the shark?

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 1:46:16Danny Jones?

  The theory is that during the summer months, there's usually, there was one, I think there was one specific summer where there was like more shark attacks ever reported in history. And that was like the summer that there was nothing happening in the news. And all the news channels, they needed to make stories. So they were just highlighting all the shark attacks that were happening. And they thought, oh my God, the sharks are on a rampage right now, just eating people. What's going on? But that's all it was like they were just focusing more on the sharks. And I think that's what happens with airplanes, right? It's like when there's an airplane crash, the news just grabs onto it and makes it a huge spectacle.

• 1:46:49Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:46:50Danny Jones?

  And so it seems like there's a lot of plane crashes.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  And it's been so safe. There's been so little of that the last 15 years that it doesn't make the news. But this past year, it started out with the DCA crash up in Washington and then Air Indy was after that and this UPS one a couple of months ago. So there's been some major crashes. It's been a long time since then. And channels like mine where I cover incidents and accidents three or four times a week. We're not making them up. They're just, there's, that stuff happens out there. You just don't hear about it. And now we're reporting on it. So now it seems like, oh my word, you know, you know, it's, it's not any more frequent than it was in the past. It's just getting reported more than it was.

• 1:47:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And when you see those graphics of all of the planes that are in the air in the continental United States at one time, it's insane.

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:47:38Danny Jones?

  You can't even see the actual map because it's covered in planes everywhere.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Every day, 104,000 takeoffs and landings worldwide. Every day.

• 1:47:50Danny Jones?

  Try to find an image that, cause I think people should see that, like how many planes are actually in the air. That, yeah, the, the one on the top right.

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:47:59Danny Jones?

  How crazy is that?

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  Now, if an airplane was as big as Idaho, it would look like that.

• 1:48:05Danny Jones?

  Right, right. That's true.

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  But that's a lot.

• 1:48:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Danny Jones?

  Is it true you can't fly over the North Pole or over Antarctica?

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  You can. It's just we I've flown close to the North Pole. It's it depends on what kind of nav equipment you get. It gets a little squirrely as everything is south, you know, it gets a little squirrely, but there are so many redundant systems now, especially with GPS that you're you're talking to something out in outer space instead of something on the ground or something that's internal that doesn't know where to go when you get to true north or the the North Pole. But yeah.

• 1:48:42Danny Jones?

  What is that anomaly we were looking at the other day, Steve? There's there's this anomaly in the in the South Atlantic anomaly. Have you heard of this?

• 1:48:52Danny Jones?

  There's like this weird hole in the atmosphere where there's like a ton of radiation coming through the earth and they call it the South Atlantic anomaly, I believe. The South Atlantic anomaly is a large, expanding, weak spot in the earth's magnetic field over South America and the South Atlantic, allowing charged solar particles to drip closer to the surface. So that must not be a big deal.

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  Well, I think it is. If you if you there's times where solar activity is higher than than other times and you'll get.

• 1:49:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, look at that. That's crazy.

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we just did a video talking about with about a bit flip and how this airplane, I think it was a JetBlue airplane coming from Cancun, just nosed over. And that's what started they grounded all the air buses, not all of them, half of them, about 6,000 airplanes to to update the software because this of this bit flip possibility and that they said to happen because of a solar flare. So in spots like that, is it the incident of solar flares higher? Yeah. Could it? Could it cause a bit flip? It could. So again, you don't want to risk that sort of thing.

• 1:49:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:50:00Speaker 03

  But it's it's all kind of very rare anyway to see a bit flip is once in a lifetime.

• 1:50:05Danny Jones?

  Go back to that last graphic, Steve, that you had with all the airplanes in the sky at once.

• 1:50:13Danny Jones?

  So what's up with those circles? Why are there no planes in those circles?

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  It's called the Himalayas.

• 1:50:19Speaker 03

  So nobody flies over the Himalayas.

• 1:50:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, those are mountainous areas.

• 1:50:22Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:50:23Danny Jones?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can't really, there's no, if, so the Himalayas are 35,000 feet. If you got an airplane that's capable of flying over it, you've only got 2,000 foot of clearance. And then if something goes wrong and you lose an engine and you have to descend, you got no place to go.

• 1:50:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  You're in a bowl and you can't get out of it. So those, those circles are bowls where nobody can, can get out of it. So they, they don't frequently dispatch an airplane through those places you go around them.

• 1:50:54Danny Jones?

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 1:50:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:50:56Danny Jones?

  Uh, I would be remiss if I had you on the podcast or if I had a airplane pilot podcast, I didn't ask him about the Bermuda Triangle. What's going on there?

• 1:51:05Speaker 03

  I was into that when I was a kid. I read like everything about the Bermuda Triangle.

• 1:51:09Danny Jones?

  It's fascinating. So the Bermuda Triangle, people that aren't aware, is the triangle with you connect. If you connect the dots between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, right?

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, something like that.

• 1:51:19Danny Jones?

  And allegedly there's been more plane disappearing, planes disappearing in that area than ever.

• 1:51:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, ships, you know, there were some ghost ships where the ship was just floating and everybody was gone.

• 1:51:29Danny Jones?

  There was even a story where there was a plane that allegedly time traveled or something. Through the Bermuda Triangle. Have you heard that one?

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I hadn't heard that one, but I.

• 1:51:38Danny Jones?

  What was the story with that one? The time traveling airplane?

• 1:51:40Speaker 03

  Flight of four or five World War II airplanes and they all disappeared and, you know, it was weird stuff. I, you know, I, I was into that when I was a kid. Um, I haven't looked at much. I, all I know is that that's an extremely dense area for air traffic.

• 1:51:54Danny Jones?

  Is it?

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the, the odds of something happening in that area are going to go through the roof. And then when you start to plant those seeds of, yeah, but, you know, and you name it something, the Bermuda Triangle. It just, it just becomes fascinating. And all of a sudden you're maybe seeing or reading something into it that's not really there.

• 1:52:10Danny Jones?

  You've never seen anything weird with your instruments or anything flying through there?

• 1:52:13Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 1:52:13Danny Jones?

  Never?

• 1:52:13Speaker 03

  Nope. There's no weird magnetic force there. And I've flown in and out of Miami, but bunches of times right through the Bermuda Triangle and nothing.

• 1:52:22Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, you know.

• 1:52:25Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:52:26Speaker 03

  Makes for great books and stories and videos.

• 1:52:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Did you find the time traveling thing, Steve? The story of the plane? Oh, what is this? The Bermuda Triangle time travel airplane myth is fueled by real events, most notably the pilot Bruce Guernon's 1970 claim of flying through a time bending vortex, reducing a 90 minute flight to 47 minutes. Oh, that's not much. The story,

• 1:52:52Danny Jones?

  the stories of flight 19's 1945 disappearance were compasses failed, leading to loss. Huh?

• 1:53:02Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:53:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:53:10Speaker 03

  There was an old episode of the Twilight Zone back in the day where they were coming back from Europe to Idlewild Airport back in the day. It's what JFK was called before it was JFK. And they they go through some time warp and they're looking for they're looking for the airport, but all it is is prehistoric land and there's dinosaurs on the ground. And they're like, what happened? You know, they went through some time warp. It's true, because it was on an episode of the Twilight Zone.

• 1:53:40Danny Jones?

  Okay, this is a little good diagram of the Bermuda Triangle.

• 1:53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Hmm. See, it's like Niagara Falls. It sucks people in like that and then fills itself in.

• 1:53:47Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  Hate it when that happens.

• 1:53:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Damn it. You're here to you're you're you're killing all my dreams here. You're killing on my.

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  No, I told you I was into that stuff. I mean, there's all sorts of great stories about the Bermuda Triangle.

• 1:54:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  And, you know, maybe I'll do a video on it sometime.

• 1:54:08Danny Jones?

  So for you, what has been like the most, like, out of all the stuff that you've that you've produced on your channel, like all the content that you've made, like, was there anything that surprised you that like, because obviously you're kind of like you're the when you were a pilot, your whole career, you're kind of like living in a bubble, right? You're not like really like dealing with the public's perception of this stuff and dealing with like the specific anxieties or interests of the public. But now that you're kind of like in the public light, doing all this stuff, you have much more of a connection to like. People's interests and what people are afraid of, like what's kind of shocked you or surprised you the most about that?

• 1:54:45Speaker 03

  Sure, that's a great question because you get in, there's the, having a social media influencer position, that's different than being a pilot from day to day, but you don't realize how interested people are in what you do as a pilot. I always told my co-pilots, I said, look, we've got the greatest job on the planet. If you're going to trade hours for dollars, this is a great job. And it's one of the few jobs on the planet that still has a fair amount of respect associated with it. Kids wave to you from the airport. People think you're neat, they want to know what you do for a living. When you go to a cocktail party, you know, that people will chat it up with you, oh, tell me about flying an airplane, right? So it's, it's, people respect that, that position so that, that you have to, you have to respect it as well.

• 1:55:27Speaker 03

  In addition to that, now, having a channel where we're talking about incidents, accidents, or stuff related to aviation, there's a, you take on a journalistic responsibility, which is something that I would have never associated with me years ago. I didn't have any journalistic responsibility of anything. But now, we have a voice in the space and, and people tune in because they want to know what Captain Steeeve thinks about something. And that really solidified with the Air India crash. Because we were the first ones to break the, the picture of the RAT. So the RAT is the ram air turbine that, that deploys if you lose both engines on a, on a commercial jet. And we were, everybody was, in the first few days, they were talking about the different

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  theories of what they thought could have brought the airplane down. And you could hear, in the audio, you could hear the RAT deployed because the RAT sounds like an Evan Rude engine, a little, real high pitched, you know, Evan Rude screaming for its life. Because it is, it's got a little prop on it and it, it provides hydraulic and electrical power to an airplane that's lost both engines. But we were able to see it in the picture. So we've got big monitors like you do here and we blew it up. And I said, oh, my word, you see that right there? That's the rat. So we, we went public with that and all of the major news agencies around the planet started showing that picture that we put up first. So that was kind of a big heavyweight moment. I was like, wow, we, we broke the news on this. Yeah.

• 1:56:55Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden you become kind of the voice of, there's a responsibility that comes with that. You have to be real careful. Yeah. That you don't jump the gun on stuff and you don't try to sensationalize something. You know, I always want to have two or three backup sources for what I'm saying. And so there's kind of a weight that comes with that. It's, it's nice. We enjoy it, but at the same time, we want to make sure we do things slowly and deliberately so we don't get out ahead of our skis, as they say. Yeah. You know, so that, that's the, the, you know, being an influencer part is, you know, you'll get called by, you know, I, I said Piers Morgan earlier. Um, one of the things that my, my son and I, when he's, he's got the film studio up there in Raleigh. And so

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  as he reminds me, I'm one of his clients. And, uh, so, uh, I said, so if the Captain Steve thing ever arrives someday, whatever that means. I said, what, what's your measure of arriving? And he told me what his was. And I said, okay, here's mine. Megyn Kelly calls. I said, if Megyn Kelly calls, I'm going to, there's the, there's the picture right there. Oh, wow. So that, that little, that little gray thing right there that looks like a, like almost like an anomaly on the screen. That's the rat. The rat has deployed. So they're at about 300 feet right now in a descent. Yeah. The rat has deployed to provide electrical and hydraulic issues so that, or power so they could still fly the airplane. Every major news agency went with that picture of the

• 1:58:20Speaker 03

  rat deployed. So, um, so, but back to Megyn Kelly. So I said, when Megyn Kelly ever calls, I'm dropping whatever I'm doing and getting on her show. And she called, I was on a cruise and my son goes, no kidding. She wants you on in 45 minutes. And I said, okay, I'll make it happen. And I did an interview with her. She was going to have me back on, almost like your reaction to my nine 11 story. Yeah. I was on her program and, and she was, um, asking me and a couple of other people questions. And somebody slid a piece of paper in front of her. She looks down, I looked down, she looks back up and she, she stops, she goes, she goes, Steve, she goes, were you supposed to be one of the pilots on, on nine 11? So I told her a real brief version of the story. She's like, oh, my word. She said, all right. And you could see her, her wheels turning. And so they, a few weeks later, they called and said, you know,

• 1:59:06Speaker 03

  Megan wants to have you on 30 minutes on September 11th to tell your story. So I said, yeah, absolutely. We'll do that. On September 10th, Charlie Kirk got shot.

• 1:59:16Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:59:17Speaker 03

  So that, that, you know, I, I didn't want to come on the show after that.

• 1:59:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  You know, everybody was talking about that for weeks. They're still talking about it. And she was, she was devastated by that. She, he was a friend of hers. So they canceled, rightly so. And maybe next year I'll be back on to tell my story on her show, but.

• 1:59:36Danny Jones?

  What did she originally want you to come on for? To talk about, was it a specific story?

• 1:59:40Speaker 03

  11th. Tell me September 11th.

• 1:59:42Danny Jones?

  The original reason.

• 1:59:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause originally I was on to talk about Air India. So we were talking about this stuff.

• 1:59:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  On her thing. And then somebody slid that piece of paper in front of her and she's like, oh, really? You know, cause it really, it does grab you.

• 1:59:53Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:59:54Speaker 03

  The whole September 11th thing. And, uh,

• 1:59:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  But, uh, so, yeah, so there's, you, you have a voice and, and people, people trust your voice and that's, that's a very rare commodity. And you have to really protect that as it's, as though it's something very precious.

• 2:00:11Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  And it is, don't abuse that. Um, take care of it and make sure, cause you won't have a voice if you abuse it at some point down the road. You'll lose it rather quickly.

• 2:00:20Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. So this, so this rat thing, it's a propeller that provides power to the plane when it's lost all power?

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  It's a last resort. So if, if both engines fail, or you have a complete hydraulic failure, or a complete electrical failure on a 787, the rat will automatically deploy. So that was one of the things that told us that both engines had failed. You can't tell by looking at it that both engines failed, except for the fact that the rat has deployed on its own. So you can hear the rat on the audio. It makes that high pitched squeal. You can see it in the picture. The guy that survived the crash said he heard a loud bang and the lights flickered. Now I don't put much credibility in a, in an eyewitness, especially a guy that just survived a plane crash. It could have been anything that caused that and his brain could be playing tricks on him.

• 2:01:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  But when that rat deploys, it deploys, wham, it, you, it hits real hard. It comes out instantaneously. And begins to spool up and it takes over electrical power in the airplane. So the lights would flicker. So what he said was right in line with the rat deploying. And then the captain, I think, or some, one of the pilots had made a mayday call. And so all four of those things put together. We went, we went public and said, we think it's a dual engine failure. And it ended up being a dual engine failure.

• 2:01:37Speaker 07

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• 2:02:36Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Good Lord. Yeah, that's, that's wild. I had no idea that was a real thing.

• 2:02:41Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:02:42Danny Jones?

  Thankfully.

• 2:02:45Danny Jones?

  Have you heard of the, um, have you heard of the, uh, the Japan Airlines? Incident where the guy allegedly saw this crazy object in the sky? Remember, well, we had a NASA physicist on here a couple of months back. Probably about six months ago. A former employee of NASA as he was employed as a physicist and now he's a professor. And he was, he was explaining to us this crazy story about this. Uh, I think it was a Japanese airline that was flying over Alaska.

• 2:03:21Danny Jones?

  And he said that he that this thing pulled up next to him that was the size, it was like a thousand times bigger than his airplane. And he landed and he had to go through all he told, gave the testimony or whatever. And he had to go through all these psychological evaluations and all this stuff. And one of the air traffic controllers or radar technician or someone on the ground corroborated a story and saying, yeah, there was something crazy on the radar. And I think it's just like a legend now. Do you remember this, Steve? The story of this? Oh, this was in, oh, wow. It was that long ago?

• 2:04:02Speaker 03

  Eighty-six?

• 2:04:03Danny Jones?

  I thought it was more recent than that.

• 2:04:05Speaker 03

  Oh, wait, that's not.

• 2:04:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. Okay. So it was a cargo airliner. Right, right, right. It was a Boeing, Japanese Boeing seven four seven, two thousand F cargo aircraft flying from Paris to Tokyo was involved in an extensive UAP sighting in its leg over Alaska. So go to the images of it. There's like, there's crazy illustrations of what he explained he saw. Just type in, just go to images. From where you were?

• 2:04:35Speaker 03

  What?

• 2:04:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, images. There you go. That's how big he says he thought it was. This thing that pulled up next to him. Crazy. So there's books written about it. And apparently this guy was like totally sane. And there was someone who corroborated it on the ground.

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:56Danny Jones?

  Over Alaska. No, they didn't mess with the plane at all. The plane was fine.

• 2:05:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:05:02Danny Jones?

  I think it just like pulled up next to him and then like disappeared.

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  So they they come from thousands of light years away just to harass a seven forty-seven to go home or disappear again.

• 2:05:11Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:05:12Speaker 03

  You know, that that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:05:13Danny Jones?

  Some people think that they're already here, that they live under the water.

• 2:05:16Speaker 03

  They, you know, they could. There's lots of water that's.

• 2:05:18Danny Jones?

  We've explored more of Mars than we've explored of our own oceans.

• 2:05:21Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:05:22Danny Jones?

  Which is pretty wild.

• 2:05:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they could, but why? They, I just always go back to the question, why? Why would you come all the way here just to hide?

• 2:05:29Danny Jones?

  Well, the theory is that most people have, most of, the most rational theories that I've heard is that they, it's a basically similar, similar civilization to us that just lives under the oceans.

• 2:05:41Speaker 03

  And they needed an ocean and we were the next one available or something?

• 2:05:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, the way the physicist described it, which is kind of fascinating. This NASA guy, the way he described it was if if you're us and we wanted to inhabit other planets, we would look for planets with liquid water. Because the environment on the surface of other planets, the atmospheres are way all over the place with the pressure, the temperature, radiation, comets, solar flares, all this stuff. It would be too unmanageable. So you would find a planet that was that had liquid water on it because liquid water can only exist between thirty thirty two degrees Fahrenheit and two hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

• 2:06:24Danny Jones?

  As well, if you're used to a certain pressure, you could just dial in your depth and figure out that pressure, right? Like the the surface atmosphere of Venus is like eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit and the pressure is like being seven miles deep in our oceans. So if you could figure out how to get from hot from ocean to ocean, you could figure out the temperature, the pressure and all that stuff. That was his hypothesis, which was pretty compelling.

• 2:06:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is great. If you're intelligent enough to figure out light speed travel or more than light speed travel in something that size, then you probably could figure out the problems with where you were to stay there.

• 2:07:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  Rather than come here and hide in the ocean, but.

• 2:07:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:07:04Speaker 03

  I love talking about it, but it's not, it's, you know, I think, is it Bill Nye? You know, Elon Musk is big on going to Mars.

• 2:07:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:13Speaker 03

  And Bill Nye, he just finally said, look, I love talking about this. It's really what we're never going to live on Mars.

• 2:07:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:07:21Speaker 03

  Okay, just.

• 2:07:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:07:22Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, there's no universe where that is reality. It's two hundred and whatever degrees below zero Fahrenheit. There's no atmosphere, there's no water, there's it's not going to happen. You can't take enough resources there to somehow rehabilitate the planet at that temperature.

• 2:07:37Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:07:39Speaker 03

  But it's great to talk about. It's fun. I'd love to take a manned mission to Mars someday. I hope that happens in my lifetime.

• 2:07:44Danny Jones?

  That would be crazy.

• 2:07:45Speaker 03

  It would be.

• 2:07:46Danny Jones?

  It was like, why would you want to, though? Because I think.

• 2:07:48Speaker 03

  Because you can.

• 2:07:49Danny Jones?

  Robots can do a better job, though.

• 2:07:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's not the same. See, you're you're not old enough. I lived through the last gee whiz in our in our culture, which was we landed on the moon, right? And I watched that live on TV as a nine year old kid and I was like. I was just in amazement at that and and everybody on the planet was like in amazement that that was going on at the time and it was the last kind of gee whiz moment we've we've had as a culture. Everything else is kind of

• 2:08:16Danny Jones?

  And the biggest, like the biggest achievement of humanity.

• 2:08:19Speaker 03

  Yes. And when you think about the the monumental size of that achievement with the computer power that they had back then, that makes it even

• 2:08:27Danny Jones?

  One one millionth the computing power of this

• 2:08:30Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 2:08:31Danny Jones?

  In the entire Apollo program.

• 2:08:33Speaker 03

  Yep, yep. I ran I ran into an Apollo astronaut years ago. This is this is a silly Steeeve story because I back into everything in my life and I most of the time don't know where I am. And I I was speaking at an event. They were they wanted my nine 11 story. And so I was the keynote speaker and it was a men's retreat in Vale, Colorado. And there's like 80 guys there that had all like every year they come and they have a guest speaker. So after the talk, I'm done talking to three or four guys and we're talking about flying airplanes. And one of the guys has a name tag on. It's an older looking gentleman. And it it says Charlie Duke on it.

• 2:09:09Danny Jones?

  He was just here.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  Okay, so Charlie Duke, I'm standing next to Charlie Duke. I have no idea who I'm standing next to. So one of the other people in the crowd looks at me and says, well, you must have flown fighter jets in the Navy. And I said, well, no, I said, I flew an airplane called a P three. I'm looking at his name, thinking that sounds like an all American name.

• 2:09:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:27Speaker 03

  Charlie doesn't know this story yet. It sounds like an all American name. I said, well, that that guy probably did. And just thinking he had a great sounding name and thousand one thousand two, somebody says, or an astronaut, which goes right over my head, right? And we so we're we're still yucking it up. So I go back to my room about a half an hour later. I'm sitting there thinking, that's a strange thing to say. Or an astronaut. I've got to I got to Google this Charlie Duke.

• 2:09:53Danny Jones?

  Tenth man to walk on the moon.

• 2:09:54Speaker 03

  Right. Everything. I see Charlie Duke and I'm like, oh my God, I'm standing next to Charlie Duke. What an idiot. So I gotta save face, right? So next morning I come down for breakfast and I gotta pretend like, you know, you know, hey buddy. So he and I are sitting at the same table and, and I, I had been stalking him all night. And I, I said, hey, Charlie, I said, I, I don't want to ask anything about your, your moon stuff. I said, you probably get inundated with that. I said, but you, you graduated from the Naval Academy and you, you got, um, you retired as a, a general in the Air Force. How did that happen? Did you, was it because of the space program? And he explained, he said, back in the late 50s, he said, the Air Force Academy wasn't in place yet. So to get officers for

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  the Air Force, they would take them from the Naval Academy and, and from West Point. They would ask a certain amount to volunteer and if they didn't, they get voluntold. And he said, I just thought it would be a good transition. So I volunteered. He said, the Mercury program was already going. They sent me out to Monterey for advanced, uh, master's degree and I just had the right background and they, I got, ended up in the Apollo program because of that.

• 2:10:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:57Speaker 03

  So he explained that transition to me, which I thought was, you know, pretty neat, but at the whole time I'm thinking he has no idea that 24 hours ago, I didn't know who he was.

• 2:11:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It's so shame. The way I think about the Apollo program is very similar to the Concorde, right? Like we were just in a full sprint to beat Russia.

• 2:11:15Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 2:11:16Danny Jones?

  And put every last resource we had into doing it. We didn't care about the risk, you know, obviously there was insane risk to like, to human life doing that for the first time ever. And, uh, we kind of like threw out that all the, all to the wind just for the spectacle of it, just to prove it, you know?

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  But there's something to be said for that. I mean, there's, there's something that, that is courageous about winning the frontier or going, stretching the bounds of, of, of possibility. And, and there's a certain amount of human courage that goes into that. I think we're so afraid now and almost even paralyzed by, well, it won't be safe. And you know, what if we get hurt? And was that, then we, we lose that, that pioneer spirit that said, hey, I'm going to hang it all out there. And if something happens, it happens, but it's on me. I'm taking the risk. Let's go.

• 2:12:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:12:07Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:12:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I agree with you there, man. I definitely agree with you there. And it, uh, allegedly we're going to have, we're going to, every president since. Since what Bush won has said that they were gonna get us back to the moon and they haven't been able to do it yet.

• 2:12:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were supposed to do it two years ago. Twenty twenty four is supposed to be.

• 2:12:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they keep pushing it back. Now they're saying, I think, twenty twenty seven.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, you have to have a good compelling reason to go like, are we just doing it because we can do it? Or are we doing it because we're gonna make a base there?

• 2:12:36Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 2:12:37Speaker 03

  And is that cost effective? All those, the same things the airlines base their decisions on.

• 2:12:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:12:42Speaker 03

  The government has to base their decisions on as well, so.

• 2:12:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:12:45Speaker 03

  I'd love to go back to the moon, just to go back to the moon.

• 2:12:47Danny Jones?

  Is it cost effective? Is it economic?

• 2:12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:50Danny Jones?

  And is it, you know, it makes total sense that we would, if we're gonna go to the moon, if we're gonna go to Mars, we gotta freaking get the robots there first to figure. I mean, they can do just as good of a job as far as tasks go or analysis or anything like the surveying. Like, what's a human, my five fingers are gonna do a better job than these autonomous robots?

• 2:13:11Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 2:13:12Danny Jones?

  So.

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:13:15Danny Jones?

  But anyways, man, thank you. This has been a fantastic conversation.

• 2:13:18Speaker 03

  Well, good.

• 2:13:19Danny Jones?

  I really appreciate your time, man. I learned a lot.

• 2:13:21Speaker 03

  I appreciate it. This is, the time went by really quick.

• 2:13:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, tell people, um, listening or watching where they can find you, get in touch with you, all that stuff.

• 2:13:29Speaker 03

  Sure, on YouTube, uh, we're approaching a million subs on YouTube and we're at Captain Steeeve with three E's, S D E E V E on YouTube.

• 2:13:38Danny Jones?

  Why the three E's? Is there a reason behind it?

• 2:13:39Speaker 03

  Okay, so here's, there's a little story. There's a story behind everything.

• 2:13:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:42Speaker 03

  So, uh, we, we started making short videos on the, on the channel and, and I didn't, I didn't wanna think of a sign off. I just started saying Captain Steeeve for fun. There's, there's a waiter at a restaurant over in Milan. It's a little coffee joint that this guy's got a gift. His name is Rafiq and it doesn't make any difference how long it's been since you've walked into his restaurant. He will remember your name and he will stretch it out. So, uh, the pilots, our hotel was right across from this coffee house. So two, three years since I seen Rafiq and everybody in his mind was a captain, whether you were or not. So you'd walk through the door and he'd go Captain Steeeve and he'd be really excited to see you, right? And I thought, wow, that's, this guy is, I'm, I'm the opposite

• 2:14:25Speaker 03

  of that. I don't remember anybody's name, but he remembered everybody's name. I thought, that's really great. So when I started signing off as Captain Steeeve, I was thinking of Rafiq saying my name out loud. And we did it for about the first 10 or 12 shorts we made. And then I thought, I need to get more serious. So I'm just going to sign off Captain Steeeve. Right? So I dropped it and the comments just lit up. Hey, I waited till the end. What happened to the Captain Steeeve? And people would spell it with 12 Es. And I thought, well, I've backed myself into a thing now. So it became Captain Steeeve, that drawn out.

• 2:14:55Danny Jones?

  That's hilarious. Yeah, I'm glad you roll. I'm glad you went with it, man. Yeah, that was great. That was a great decision.

• 2:14:59Speaker 03

  Me too. It is. It makes you distinctive and in a kind of a fun, we try to be educational, informational, and a little snarky when we can be.

• 2:15:06Danny Jones?

  Hilarious. I love it, man. Um, thank you again. We'll link all that stuff below.

• 2:15:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:15:10Danny Jones?

  And, uh, we have Patreon stuff.

• 2:15:14Speaker 03

  We do.

• 2:15:15Danny Jones?

  Do you mind answering some questions for our beautiful people at Patreon?

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:15:19Danny Jones?

  We got, we have, uh, Patreon members who asks.

• 2:15:22Speaker 03

  We'll do an episode of Ask the Captain right now.

• 2:15:24Danny Jones?

  Ask the Captain. Alright, so that's it for the podcast. Thanks again, man. Thanks to everybody. And we're going to Patreon.

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

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