It’s an optical illusion. The planes aren’t really that close together. The person who shot the video is using a telephoto lens and is zoomed way in. This compresses the space and flattens it out so it’s hard to judge distance. Also the plane in front is smaller than the one in the back which heightens the illusion. It’s a really cool shot!
Wait a minute, are you telling me that the hobbit actors weren’t really that small?
No they were, Peter Jackson just had his actor’s legs cut off for the movie
Guy heard the stage expression “break a leg” and kept thinking about it for too long.
I mean, it’s rare enough that 2 planes land at the same time. They are definitely “close” but probably some 200m apart.
It’s not as rare as you may think. I used to work at a weather service office located right near the end of one of the runways at IAD and it would happen a few times a day if the airport was busy and the winds were such that they were coming in from our side.
Interesting. Thank you for correcting me. TIL
Well, now I need to see commercial airplane drag racing.
Is this standard procedure or an emergency situation?
OMG I wasn’t expecting this much answers! Thank you all 🙏
I’ve done this (sitting in a passenger seat), it’s normal. This video is a bit of an optical illusion, the planes are nowhere near as close as they look.
There are certain airports where it’s standard procedure.
So the Alaska is a e175 which is about 70 people vs the United which is about 170 people. It looks close because of the angle and some camera tricks. Landing on parallel runways happens all the time.
They are called Precission radar monitoring approaches and they start doing them when things get super congested. Requires us to listen to another radio so atc can tell us to break-out if someone crosses the no go zone in between the runways.
Likely just an issue with the perspective of the video, I bet these planes have plenty distance between them if you were to see them from the front
Captain Joe has a good video on PRM and SOIA approaches.
Not necessarily standard, but not likely an emergency. Loads of places have the setup required for parallel landings / takeoffs, it’s just usually more efficient to have them alternating
Here’s a list of the places that have parallel runways (bottom of the page)
It looks dangerously close due to the camera lens.
In reality it wasn’t.
That has to be an emergency. I can’t see how any pilot would risk it unless they had to.
The runways are probably 300 m apart.
Ah, so it’s perspective trickery. Still scary AF to watch.
SFO
This needs a Strauss waltz as a soundtrack…
Butter.
I’m more concerned about thos birds flying around the airport.
Another cool thing to think about is how like, this video of two planes landing can create a bunch on interesting discussions, i mean, just look at all these comments!
I knew it! I thought it to be impossible that planes can fly that close with each other without affecting each other. The air pressure (or whatever) would be affecting the flight of another plane if they are too close with each other.
