Call me judgmental, but my perception is that the entire reason for too many youtuber's channels very existence, is views, likes and subs, which come all too easily with "cool" flying footage. A love of, or a desire to learn & teach about aviation, is secondary to gaining social media exposure, which is easier with a complex photogenic topic like flying anything. Can I find or prove a direct cause and effect for any one youtube's accident? no... Would this accident have been prevented if cameras hadn't been present? not necessarily, but...how ironic that video exists of the instructor issues & with the autopilot. Take a look at the FLOOD of TikTok fly girls shoving "content" out there... Young, attractive, energetic, speaking about and demonstrating how great flying is, but clueless about the real risks of flying 60 old year piston powered aircraft. Do you think the RedBull swap would have been attempted without cameras? You know, just to become proficient at changing airplanes midair...?

I think you’re right, imo just from what I have watched it looks like the bigger issue was her instructors didn’t make absolutely sure she was learning the fundamentals. Non of her vids really show her being distracted at all by the cameras or video equipment.

i agree with you to a point. so much youtube content is more about trying to monetize a channel than about trying to just show off flying. It would suit me just fine if youtube stopped paying all together, and then you would see just who does it for fun and who is more interested in money and freebies.

@@rule1dontgosplat Yep I am guilty. I owned a GoPro long before I started filming flying. My first Hi Rez "selfie", was one I'd taken where I'd duct taped my Gopro Hero 2 to the wing of my Cessna 210 and put the camera on time lapse, then went and flew for a hour. I'm not really throwing stones here at content creators, but I had a long tenured understanding of saftey markers in flying before these type of cameras were even invented. For many the camera became the fascination first, then they found aviation as a way to employ it...

soon!

Apparently? The more sophisticated the auto pilot system, THE MORE the pilot needs to understand about it's logic. You've got it ALL wrong. Simple wing levelers like the early -300 series Cessna systems couldn't really hurt ya unless you were hell bent on keeping it connected, even if it was doing what you didn't want it to. That's always the way to find the solution...reduce the level of technology to something you're able to manage, if necessary even to the point of hand flying, until you get the result you intended. Then attempt to reengage the autopilot or automation you'd downgraded from. As autopilot became more sophisticated, they introduced even greater idiosyncratic behaviors that had to be studied. Some pilots never get it. They make what could be a ballet look like a wrestling match. The MD-80 (the first fully digital flight guidance auto flight system) had several of those quirks. The altitude arm function being built into the altitude select knob, that required a tug to "arm" was one. If it wasn't properly "armed" after being set, it wouldn't level and capture from climb or descent. Leveling off from a descent, with airspeed below target speed was another that would cause the auto throttle's near full power command from idle. With the long spool time, particularly of the JT8D-209 engines, would catch a weak pilot, result in severe & abrupt acceleration, that could incur passengers, and send flight attendants and service carts tumbling. Pair digital flight guidance with navigation and pilot understanding had to make another quantum leap. Early loran systems caused many gross navigational error violations, not on their own, but when coupled to NAV functions of those autopilots by pilots with substandard understanding. The addition of the ability to "constrain" waypoints in full blown FMS systems while using LNAV and VNAV caused the early 737-300's to be nick named "the terminator" by several airline training departments, because of the high rate of training failures. As the software side developed to even further accommodate complexities of SIDS and STARS and the ever growing complexity of airspace in general, pilot proficiency and understanding needed to continue to grow. NO, the better auto pilots didn't do everything, instead better, more well trained pilots DID. Hands down the most immersive systems training for B757/767/777 and 787 pilots are the auto flight sections but particularly the auto land modules within this auto flight training. I can't speak for the airbus line of equipment as I'd never flown one. Since you've resorted to insult on the camera issue, suggesting the technology might be confusing to me, your vanity is exactly an example of how a rolling camera changes behavior. It's not the technology, it's the chance to preserve something for someone's ego on video or film. We are all subject to this influence. It's the people that don't realize what happens that are most vulnerable. People do things with the camera rolling, that they might never consider otherwise. Many aircraft accidents started out as a final flight before retirement (especially from the armed forces) media flights and what I like to call "attention whore flights". Where pilots go just a little lower, faster, deeper into the unknown etc. because someone or something, like a seemingly harmless camera on a ram mount, is rolling.

​​@@YankeeinSC1 first of all I wasn't meaning to insult you about the video production. You seem to talk about it like you imagined it would be confusing. As if she was holding a cell phone and taking cute selfies while flying. In the videos of hers I watched she seemed to just have the videos set up and forgot about them until it was time to edit things later that's why you see camera switches. Thank you your reply was very educational so they called one of the autopilots to Terminator because it was so unnecessarily complicated. It doesn't quite work like the autopilot in Microsoft flight simulator is what I'm getting at. A lot of older people who get into flight or even younger ones will have experienced that program and how it works and might expect Its Behavior. You tell that thing to hold a certain altitude and what altitude do you want to hold and you can let it do its thing. Closest thing to behavior like what you talk about is trying to get it to hold a certain heading versus a radio navigation heading versus a GPS guided route. The autopilot she had seemed like it was just enough autopilot to cause problems and not enough to save labor.

mismanaging an autopilot in a Cessna 150 can get you killed. The airplane is not that advanced nor sophisticated. The problem was that she didn't have a good understanding of how the autopilot was limited by not having auto trim capability. That caused the vertical oscillations. Do you think she ever tried to disconnect it and hand fly?

@@YankeeinSC1 she actually does use the disconnect in one of her videos. So she knew about it for sure, I think the bigger thing was she might not have a- understood trim, and b- understood that the up/down buttons on the autopilot console were momentary and c- understood attitude/altitude mode differences on the autopilot. Combine those slices together and you get a hole

extremely...always been a sucker for a man in uniform