Thanks to YouTube, one of the most mysterious processes in air travel—how planes take off and land—has been made lucid online. Photographs Courtesy YouTube

Anxiety can be a talisman for an unknown fate. On Twitter, I follow something called Food Poisoning Bulletin, which keeps me up to date on every case of befouled meat or E. coli infection in the fifty states. Because these grim dispatches come infrequently, I also follow an account called AirLive.net, which broadcasts all known aviation crises, usually while the troubled aircraft is in flight. These short reports, made in a pidgin of hashtags and airline codes, start in the early morning, with the European destinations, and continue through the day, often ending with Qantas. Maybe BE403, from Belfast, is experiencing wing-flap problems and will shortly make a high-speed landing on the Birmingham runway. Perhaps AF128, to Beijing, got diverted to St. Petersburg after losing an engine. To keep a finger on the pulse of aviation is to accept that the pulse is always, somewhere, racing; that the globe is many local problems in communication; and that unexpected landings are not usually fatal. I say I follow these emergencies because I’m morbid, but the truth is that they fortify a fruitful attitude toward life.

In the magazine this week, I write about the vexed intersection of air travel and the Internet, two technologies that ostensibly facilitate rapid communication between distant regions of the globe. By many measures, they’re in competition. Yet, in cases such as AirLive.net, aviation and the Web are improbably conjoined. That’s also true of one of the strangest corners of the YouTube-iverse, a genre of entertainment that has fascinated me since I began looking closely at the culture of flight. This is the realm of cockpit videos: footage from one of the most secret and mysterious processes in air travel now made public and lucid online.

I first watched a YouTube cockpit video a few years ago—two Lufthansa pilots landing a huge Airbus A380 at SFO, in daylight, with a terrifying soundtrack superimposed. The revelation was what a mediated, low-key process it appeared to be. The descent consisted mostly of swivelling knobs to set direction and, occasionally, typing; the captain didn’t turn the autopilot off until the final seconds of the flight, when he brought the plane down with a tiny joystick. Everything else appeared to be computerized. It's often said that you can tell the quality of a commercial pilot from his landing, and I understood why: takeoff and landing are usually the only times when the pilot is manually driving the plane.

Occasionally, the computerization of flight causes problems. In the December, 2014, issue of Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche, a former pilot, published an excellent account of the final minutes of Air France Flight 447—the airliner that mysteriously disappeared over the Atlantic, in 2009—suggesting that disaster might have been averted if the pilots’ understanding of the airplane hadn’t been buffered by fly-by-wire electronics. (Fly-by-wire isn’t computerization, per se; it’s electronic mediation—think of the anti-lock brakes in your car.) And Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who famously landed in the Hudson, has said that his landing would probably have been smoother if he hadn’t been fighting the plane’s anti-phugoid system, a computer response designed to correct for bouncing in the air.

In all but anomalous cases, though, airplanes’ autopilot systems free up pilots—and allow the thrill-seeking YouTube viewer to focus on what’s out the window. Below is a hometown takeoff, from Kennedy airport, in New York. At the foot of the runway, you’ll see a pilot push two levers to throttle the plane’s twin engines. The pilot not flying counts off relevant speeds: V1 is the speed after which the aircraft must take off; it can no longer come to a stop before the end of the runway. V2 is speed at which the plane can climb with only one engine (a safety precaution). Pilots usually lift off the runway (“rotate”) between the two.

Even takeoffs grow old after a while, though, and I soon began seeking more-exotic experiences, which are easy to find. The Concorde is no longer in service, but, amazingly, its cockpit videos are on the Internet: you can watch the pilots pull up the aircraft’s pointy nose in the air and fire its afterburners past the sound barrier. Other flights involve unusual runways. As I point out in the magazine, Web tourism is no substitute for the real thing, but there are few circumstances in which one would ever find oneself in the cockpit during a landing at the notoriously tiny runway in Paro, Bhutan, nestled among the mountains, or while making the famous landing over the beach in St. Martin. Here’s a hair-raising landing between the mountains, in Peru.

Those flights were entirely successful—as all but a negligible number are. But the Internet’s native mood is alarmism, and it’s easy to find videos of journeys that went less well—whether it’s footage of a pilot landing in strong crosswinds or in a rainstorm. Below is cockpit footage from a Swiss flight to Shanghai. Soon after the plane, a massive four-engine Airbus A340, gets in the air, the pilots find one of the jets overheating; they have to shut it down. First, though, they have to consult the plane manual. Then they have to pause to eat some chocolate. All the while, the pilots trade off who’s officially flying the plane. The most unsettling part of the whole experience, for the captain, seems to be talking to the passengers on the P.A.

For a disaster-tropic viewer this process, like most things that happen at thirty-six thousand feet, comes as an anticlimax. But for the anxiety-prone passenger it’s a reassurance. The legend of “Sully,” the crackerjack captain who landed an engineless plane in the river, was more alarming than it was confidence-building: this was clearly a pilot of exceptional skill and calm—a superhuman of the skies—and the popular narration of his story implied that only a hero could have rescued that plane. We similarly celebrate the vigilante passengers who stop would-be bombers from lighting up their shoes or detonating their underwear. Flight has become, in the popular imagination, a field of heroism. It is a battleground as a result.

The truth, which comes through in these videos, is that the pilot riding to work, on the A train, can expect a less surprising workday than anyone else on his subway car. In a worst-case scenario, weather or maintenance delays his flight. In the worst worst_-_case scenario, something goes awry midair, and a string of safety nets falls into place. Pilots needn’t be heroes; they’re people. That doesn’t make the work that they do less miraculous.