[Closed] Clapping when your plane lands...

If the flight is bumpy enough people will clap, trust me.

It does, mostly on tourist type destination flights

a business commuter flight could land in flames with only one wing and most would barely look up from the paper...

a business commuter flight could land in flames with only one wing and most would barely look up from the paper…

If they spill even a drop of my Chablis...

My father was a pilot. In his wise words, "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing."

TBF, the smooooooooth touchdown we had in Krakow a couple of weeks ago, I expect the co-pilot to have leaned over and used a gold marker pen to add an extra stripe to the captain's shirt/blouse... And all of us applauded.

Happens regularly: fly Alitalia, domestic Russian or anywhere in Africa / India.

In the UK I mentally applaud any jet2 flight event. Departures, takeoff, landing, not having the overhead bins fall open randomly. I also think any flight in a Flybe q400 where the wheels actually come down deserves a cheer.

Can’t stand it. Drive home is far more dangerous but I never see an eager crowd applauding enthusiastically when I get to my house without crashing into anything.

Used to be on the Glasgow and Liverpool flights I seem to recall.

"Drive home is far more dangerous"

Oft said, but misleading. Flying is safer per km or per hour but the probability of dying on a random flight is higher than a random car journey. In the same way that space travel is safe on a per km basis but monstrously dangerous by any other measure.

You are roughly three times more likely to killed on your flight as you are on the drive home.

Statistic statistics, I believe 2017 was the safest year in aviastion with no fatalities in any commercial flights.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42538053

I belive Flaperon also has some expertise in this area.

KLM "my other plane is a Stuka"

My mate's a pilot and finds it quite condescending.

“Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”

and if you can use the plane again afterwards, it's an excellent one.

Music on the vid is awful, so I turn it off.. 😜

I think it would piss me off a bit if I was a pilot, it's basically saying " we weren't really sure if we would make it back alive so thanks for not killing us"

It should be reserved for when they've pulled off a landing with an engine down or broken landing gear etc.

I find the whole experience bizarre. Introducing the pilot and crew is odd. Why don’t you get the same on boats or trains?

I too would find it annoying if I was part of the flight crew. Why people choose to clap somebody for doing their job is beyond me.

If there has been an event or something adverse they have had to deal with then maybe fair enough, but for everyday 'just doing their job', nahhh.

I watched one of the aborted landings in that video in person. Looked a lot more scary at the time! Mad French pilot came back around and made sure he wouldn’t be going around for a third go!

rachel

Why people choose to clap somebody for doing their job is beyond me.

You do NOT want to go to the theatre 🙂

The same could be said for clapping when the film ends at the cinema. No one from the film is going to be there, so what is the point? It's like clapping for the success of the Inca civilisation or something.

Flashy your Dad is Chuck Yeager?

On a similar note, I love the little jingle they play on Ryanair when they land on time. it's just a shame that they play it soooo rarely.

I would imagine it's a response to a dissipation of a tense situation for the nervous flyers, a bit of herd mentality and for a few a genuine thanks because you can't go into the cockpit and thank the pilot

Latin Americans are big on clapping non-fatal landings. I always put it down to a mix of Catholicism, fatalism and daily exposure to really bad road traffic accidents. Ultimately I think it's God they are applauding for not killing them rather than the pilot who is simply HIS instrument. Or something like that...

The same could be said for clapping when the film ends at the cinema.

Is is this a thing?

Yep people have applauded in a cinema normally when a film has blown people away

I took my g/f to Vegas on a standby ticket whilst I was operating Crew and she said there was a big round of applause on my landing apparently.

It doesn't bother me because I can't hear it!

But... to quote an old boss of mine: never judge a pilot by the landing!

Lots of factors go into a competently run, safe flight. No point in having a smooth landing if you've used up half the runway to touch down in doing so. The passengers will never know the risk they've just been exposed to...

Better sometimes a firm 'arrival' than a greaser.

It happens a lot in the Middle East, I think it's because people don't understand how safe modern aircraft are and they think a crash is narrowly avoided on each flight. Religious fatalism plays a big part; people blame their God for everything that happens and don't understand that some very clever and well-trained humans are actually the ones who ensure their safety.

they think a crash is narrowly avoided on each flight.

They're not wrong.

“Drive home is far more dangerous”

Oft said, but misleading. Flying is safer per km or per hour but the probability of dying on a random flight is higher than a random car journey. In the same way that space travel is safe on a per km basis but monstrously dangerous by any other measure.

You are roughly three times more likely to killed on your flight as you are on the drive home.

Not true...whichever way you cut the stats flying if orders of magnitudes safer than driving. If you chose a random flight anywhere in the world every day it would be hundreds of thousands of years before you would be involved in an accident...and even then the chances are you'd survive. Flying is safer per KM, per trip, number of fatalities per journey, however you want to view it. In fact in 2017 there was zero accidents or deaths in commercial passenger Jet aviation....you simply can't get any safer than that, and a small number involving small commercial aircraft less than 50. 3,500 people die on British roads every year and we've got one of the best if not the best road safety record in the world.

Nobody claps when on Indian flights.....the wheels have barely touched down and half of them are getting  up and getting their bags out of the overhead bins and starting to walk up the  isles towards the door. The Cabin Crew don't seem to bat an eyelid.

Yep people have applauded in a cinema normally when a film has blown people away

Weird.

Someone always starts clapping when jet2 land but no one joins in lol

Love the Ryanair jingle "it's the sound of the start of your holiday" as a mate once remarked

A sure sign of the lower classes tbf

I used to fly 2-3 times a week on a corporate airline so regular fliers got to know the flight crew quite well- an old favourite was "did we crash land or were you shot down?" often on a one-wheeler, bouncy-bouncy which pops the overhead lockers when we had a shear-crosswind. Once on a particularly rough flight in an 8-seater King-Air where the co-pilot was sick.

A friend of mine once described a horrific landing during a storm. After two failed attempts at Glasgow, they were diverted to Edinburgh. Now this guy is a typically a very cool customer; the very last person you'd expect to clap when a plane lands. When that plane touched down, he was, in his own words, "clapping like a captive chimp when they bring the bananas 'round".

Someone always starts clapping when jet2 land but no one joins in lol

That's not clapping.

#fifteenfeethighclub

There was a round of applause when we landed at Glasgow returning from Corfu the other week. Might have been relief that folk were finally going to get away from some of the awful weegies on the flight.

We tend to take a trip to the cinema every Christmas to see 'It's A Wonderful Life'. Every time it finishes, no matter what cinema we're in, there's a big round of applause. I've never joined in because I'm usually too busy trying to get the dust out of my eyes at the end...these old cinemas are very dusty, but I still find it a bit odd.

I think you should applaud a bus driver for getting through Wythenshawe with the windows intact.

We clapped along with the rest of the cinema when we saw Deadpool in Canada. It was brilliant though and a much more enthusiastic experience than when I saw it in the UK. Much LOLing (or is it LingOL?) and cheering and somehow not in an irritating way (which it probably would be in this country!)

Introducing the pilot and crew is odd.

I suspect it has much to do with the *perceived* dangers of flight and hoping to calm those of a more nervous disposition by giving them a personal connection to the team - 'Ahh, he sounds a very calm and sensible fellow, he won't be crashing the plane today'.

It seems a strange irony that the people who clap a safe landing tend to be from cultures with the strongest beliefs that there is a better place waiting for them when the plane does plough into the ground at 500 miles an hour.

I had a landing in Edinburgh where the pilot had to have a 2nd try, pulling up from owhat felt ike feet from the tarmac. The descent on the 2nd attempt seemed worse than the 1st...but he landed it OK.

I don't think there was any applause, I for one was checking my underwear...

Month after 9/11 flying into LAX, smooth as anything and big cheers and clapping. Though a view of a fighter jet seeming to parallel us on landing may have contributed to it.

I remember landing at Liverpool in thick fog once. Ryanair flight. Dropped into the cloud at about 500ft. Normally I've got a pretty good sense of direction but I couldn't see a thing, had no idea if we landed east or west but there was a lot of jinking around. Pilot got a big round of applause for that from the whole plane althoguh I suspect it was the autopilot doing most of the work in those conditions.

Sort of related, I was flying into Manchester on New Year's Day about 0.30 so we had New Year mid way up the Irish Sea. The flight had lots of families on board, presumably returning from Christmas holidays and loads of kids asleep. This little beeping alarm went off at midnight and some guy a few rows in front put his hands up and went "IT'S MIDNIGHT, HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!" to be met with stony glares of anger from all the parents of the kids he'd just woken up. That one fell totally flat!

I remember landing in Gibraltar where it felt like the plane landed in the tarmac rather than on it, he hit it so hard that i thought may be the engines had failed and we dropped the last 3 feet. Nobody clapped but i think it was because we were all winded. It seems this is the norm for this particular runway.

It is a bit of a bizarre phenomenon, but certainly fairly common in some parts of the world.

I was almost able to forgive it on an internal flight in Russia where the pilot did his 'ladies and gentleman, we'll shortly be landing...' speech, after which nothing actually happened for another 40 minutes. No flight or cabin crew said anything thing until (in English) "This is the captain. Brace for impact!" followed by the cabin crew going into a full rendition of "Brace for impact; get down, stay down!" alternating in Russian and English. Once we had (successfully) landed and everything seemed to be OK (and people had un-braced themselves) there was a round of applause. Seems the wheels down/locked indicator hadn't come on in the cockpit so the pilot wasn't quite sure what was going to happen... The clues were there as to what was happening (as we circled, did a couple of low passes of the airfield etc), but clearly the crew had decided it was better to keep people guessing!

Great stories folks.

I fly in/out of London city (Docklands) on average 4 times a month, if you’ve ever been there it looks quite small, deceptively so.. and Albert Dock is on your right ...

Anyway, it’s no surprise when tacking off that you get the impression that the pilots climb trajectory isn’t quite high enough as you head for Barclays Bank.

And visaversa I have seen some planes fly very low indeed over Barclays whilst sitting at my desk on the 24th floor...

It seems a strange irony that the people who clap a safe landing tend to be from cultures with the strongest beliefs that there is a better place waiting for them when the plane does plough into the ground at 500 miles an hour.

That's because despite their competitive piety, even strongly superstitious people still can't quite trust their God to deliver them safely.

If you chose a random flight anywhere in the world every day it would be hundreds of thousands of years before you would be involved in an accident…

<span style="text-decoration: underline;">Probably</span>.  but not definitely.

I remember this in the 1970's.

I've also flown into Gibraltar.

Because of the political situation the plane needs to make a weird approach and then come in really steeply. Gib also has a very short runway so the brakes get yanked on very quickly and very hard.

A safe landing there always gets a round of applause.

My workmate did a similar trip and the plane was carrying too much speed as it hit the runway and had to pull up again or go off the end of the runway.

it circled and approached again and the same thing happened, too fast and then pull up again.

It was circling for a third attempt and my mate was pretty nervous by this stage. He clapped when the pilot announced they were diverting to the Spanish airport along the coast even if it di add a couple of hours onto his trip.

Don’t the planes just fly down a beam transmitted from the runway and could more or less land themselves in calm conditions? It’s only when the wind makes it tricky then the pilots get to show off their skills?

don’t think I have ever witnessed clapping but after a tricky landing well executed have seen the captain come out of the cabin and stand there beaming as passengers get of the plane, I gave him an appreciative nod.

I'm also just re-reading 'Nam which gives first hand accounts of the Vietnam war.

Apparently as one 19 year old approached Nam for the first time on a commercial airliner circa 1968 the pilot announced "welcome to Vietnam, the outside temperature is 98 degrees and ground fire is light to moderate'.

In the early 80's we went to Madeira , the pilot got a standing ovation. 🙂

Witnessed this a few times on flights with a large contingent of East Europeans.

Never joined in myself but after a particularly interesting landing into BHX after two aborted attempts in the middle of a blizzard , I did make a point of shaking the pilots hand as I disembarked.

I heard a story about a 'plane that made an absolutely perfect landing at Heathrow. The person who told the story said there were two Boeing engineers in the seats behind who commented on the quality of the pilot: "This guy really knows how to fly the thing!" and then bang on cue the pilot came on the tannoy to announce that it had been the first ever landing using the new automatic landing equipment. Folklore says it is so accurate that in snow, successive aircraft of the same type only leave one set of tyre tracks.

Flying into an airstrip in the Philipines, quite literally a cleared mud pathway in the jungle, El Nido, if you care to knnow.

first pass along the runway at about 20ft without touchdown, pilots leans around the cabin door, “it’s OK now, water buffalo scared off the runway!”

A flight to remember that was.

Don’t the planes just fly down a beam transmitted from the runway and could more or less land themselves in calm conditions?

Only big modern airports have it afaik.

Landed at Lukla. I would have clapped except my hands were still gripping the seat.

Most airlines now allow or even require pilots to land manually.  Finals are still done on auto which ensures the plane is correctly set up on the glideslope and at the right speed, but the system is switched into standby after the GO/NOGO decision point, and the plane is flown to touchdown manually.  This is done to "keep the pilots eye in" as it has been found that too  much reliance on automation actually hinders the pilots abilities in an emergency.

(pilots also report hating the autotouchdown because it lands bang on the middle of the r/w and the nosewheel therefore bumps over the centreline paint strips and lights which shakes the cockpit annoyingly!)

I had a late go-around 2 weeks ago flying into Split, Croatia, where a local thunderstorm reduced visibility to below VFR just before GO/NOGO, so the pilot choose to abort, go around and line up again.  Second time round, we landed neatly on a very wet runway (lots of spray from the reversers and a bit of AntiSkid could be felt trimming the main gear brakes but not very dramatic really) and passengers clapped, despite really nothing actually happening other than the pilot needing to fly around in a circle to restablish then aircraft into the finals........

If you fly in to or out of an airport that has vendors offering to cling wrap your luggage you are likely to experience clapping on landing.

BTW, these vids are quite interesting, showing a modern heavy taking off and landing

Take off  

Landing: 

 there was zero accidents or deaths in commercial passenger Jet aviation….you simply can’t get any safer than that

Errr yes you can.

For every crash there will have been ~10 Ohhh ***  * **** f%^*$£ moments.

For every one of those ~10 ohhh **** shouldn't have done that's

For every one of those ~10 oop's

For every one of those ~10 mistakes that weren't even noticed.

For every one of those ~10 times something was done that had the potential to go wrong (two buttons next to each other and you always press the right one).

Good H&S isn't stopping once you've stopped killing people, it's working away at the things that cause accidents. Because one day one of the little things will escalate badly. The aim is to eliminate the thousands of minor events at the bottom of the pyramid, that way you know you've eliminated some of each tier above it.

Pah’ Airplanes-I just use my time machine

I used to live in Wellington, NZ and that was always an exciting landing, i did it 4 times a week...can;t remember people clapping but have had some bum clenching moments for sure.

Not true…whichever way you cut the stats flying if orders of magnitudes safer than driving.

I'm pretty certain if you take the per meter for the last meter then landing is way ahead.

If you take the last meter driving vs last meter flying then there are probably way more bumps parking but these are unlikely to be fatal...

Just take a look at the state of those clapping around you before you before deciding to join in. One word, Brighthouse.

Don’t the planes just fly down a beam transmitted from the runway and could more or less land themselves in calm conditions?

I think you're thinking about the Death Star tractor beam.

I always thought it was a German thing.

Don’t the planes just fly down a beam transmitted from the runway