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Social Media’s ‘Bottle Cap Challenge’ a Dangerous Game

CFI tries to figure out the allure of intentionally adding FOD to a runway for the purpose of hitting it.

The Bottle Cap Challenge has seen a lot of activity on social media. [YouTube Screengrab: Patagonia Bush Pilots]
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Key Takeaways:

  • The article discusses the prevalence of dangerous social media "challenges," highlighting a recent "Bottle Cap Challenge" specifically for pilots.
  • This pilot challenge involves placing soda bottles on a runway and attempting to knock off their caps with an aircraft's tires during takeoff.
  • The author strongly condemns the challenge as unsafe, arguing it creates foreign object debris (FOD), risks damage to aircraft and injury to individuals, and offers no practical or valuable pilot skill development.
  • Legitimate pilot training exercises, like STOL practice and spot landings, are presented as a stark contrast to the pointless and hazardous nature of such social media stunts.
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One of the outgrowths of video-enhanced social media are the number of “challenges” that are shared on them. For the unfamiliar, these challenges often involve a physical activity, like having a bucket of ice dumped over your head, having six of your closest friends hit golf balls at you, riding a skateboard down a flight of stairs at a public library, etc. The non-social media general public often hears about these challenges when the person performing the challenge is injured or worse.

For example, a few years ago, health officials were warning consumers not to eat detergent pods when the Tide Pod Challenge became a thing—the challenge involved people who ate the whole bowl of stupid on a given day and were inspired to swallow a packet of poisonous detergent as a means of gaining attention on social media.

Meg Godlewski

Meg Godlewski has been an aviation journalist for more than 24 years and a CFI for more than 20 years. If she is not flying or teaching aviation, she is writing about it. Meg is a founding member of the Pilot Proficiency Center at EAA AirVenture and excels at the application of simulation technology to flatten the learning curve. Follow Meg on Twitter @2Lewski.

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