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Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
121–130 of 491 posts
Re: Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so sure you know what a good distance is from the car in front of you.
In a multi-car pileup, the car immediately in front of you literally stops in an instant, much faster than if it were to fully hit the brakes. It's much faster than any driver could realistically expect. It can happen so fast, you may not even see brake lights turn on. It's why these pileups can get so surprisingly large.
Just to quantify this, the shortest 60-0 stopping distance for a "consumer-grade" car (meaning not a formula one vehicle) is the Porsche 911, which can do it in 27m. This is nearly 6 vehicle lengths. Usual safety guidelines are to stay about 3 car lengths behind whoever you're following, so even world's greatest brakes are not gonna save you if the vehicle in front stops in 0m because it hits an immovable pile of already stopped objects itself.
Re: Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I think even the colossally tone-deaf FAA wouldn't try to prosecute this guy under these circumstances, there's an odd gray area here, where a certificated pilot can deviate from any regulation to meet the need of an emergency [1] -- so I think a twist of logic would allow a non-pilot to be allowed to deviate from the "must have a pilot certificate" rules to meet his emergency the same way while acting as pilot…
One might argue that if he's specifically following the direct instructions of the ATC, who is a licensed pilot in this case, that the ATC is "the pilot," and his allowing of a non-pilot to push the buttons on his behalf was a necessary deviation to handle the emergency and land the plane.
If that's the case, shouldn't the controller be a Certificated Remote Pilot under Part 107 rules?
Re: Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video game experience is absolutely better than no experience. On small general aviation planes, the feature set is quite minimal and most simulators will replicate all of it faithfully enough, so the only remaining thing is the “feel” of the plane which you can hopefully experience a bit during flight before landing. In contrast, a big passenger jet has insane amounts of different systems that need to be configured…
The biggest problem is communication. The best thing you can have, more than some idea how an aeroplane works even, is knowing how to talk to the ground. If you're talking to the ground, you get both practical benefits (people on the ground know how to fly that plane, and know what you need to do to get it back down safely) and a morale boost. Chances are if you're taking over in an emergency, the radios are already…
> once people realise you're serious
I know people joke around on guard, but, I have to imagine joking about that topic is rather taboo.
Re: Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
#125I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I was about to make a joke about it but I'm actually serious. Once I, a former Houstonian with no experience driving on ice, was driving through the snowy mountains and lost control of my car. Instead of panicking, my video-game-induced laser focus kicked in and I calmly piloted the car until the wheels gained traction and I could park the car on the side of the road. But l…
> Thanks, video games.
Based on how common it has become for people to tailgate and then twitchily bail out of their lane at the last second before they rear end the person in front of them, I'm very 50-50 on how well video games prepare our reflexes for the real world.
Re: Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
#126Pilot here. I'm floored that a person with no flying experience could put this airplane down without a scratch. Air traffic controllers are not necessarily pilots, but luckily, this one was a pilot and certified instructor. ATC and passenger worked through a stressful situation to produce an amazing outcome. Bravo!
I heard the story on the radio this morning and they said that not only was the controller a certified instructor but he flew this specific plane so he knew how to direct him to everything on the panel! Really incredible bit of coincidence.
From one of the other submissions:
"Morgan had never flown this model Cessna. He pulled up a picture of the instrument panel's layout and started guiding his new student step-by-step."
Morgan was the ATC.
Re: Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
#127I bet this was a guy raised on video games. I was about to make a joke about it but I'm actually serious. Once I, a former Houstonian with no experience driving on ice, was driving through the snowy mountains and lost control of my car. Instead of panicking, my video-game-induced laser focus kicked in and I calmly piloted the car until the wheels gained traction and I could park the car on the side of the road. But l…
Yeah, games are so misunderstood. It's not just for kids, and it's not just entertainment, it just happens to be that way because of the stigma. They are interactive experiences with software and that could be virtually anything. The learning and training potential is huge if companies started making proper games again (where the experience is priority) and not fancy theme park pay2win casinos for children.
Games are just rich interactive models of some synthetic, emulated, or simulated system. They can be perfect for building intuition about complex systems that are difficult to represent linearly as in text or video. Games could be a very promising future for education & training but they still carry an old stigma with them & the f2p ad driven game wasteland of the app store only helps reinforce that stigma.
Re: Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think you could fairly easily talk someone through landing The bad news is that it is 10/28 (east-west) and the wind was reported from the north at 11 knots gusting 17. KPBI 101553Z 02011G17KT 10SM SCT042 SCT046 26/15 A student pilot with 20 hours of training probably wouldn’t have been signed off by his/her/zir/their instructor to operate in that kind of crosswind. From: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2022/05…
“signed off by his/her/zir/their instructor to operate” What does “zir” mean? I’ve seen it around but can’t remember where.
I’ve seen it used as a gender neutral pronoun and some people prefer it to his/her but most people now just use “their” when they don’t know don’t know the gender of the person they are talking about.
Re: Passenger with “no idea how to fly” lands plane after pilot incapacitated
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk, I’ve only flown 172s and have only landed a handful of times myself, but I think you could fairly easily talk someone through landing with an at least decent chance of survival if the weather was good. I mean this is not an experiment you want to run, of course. But landing in good conditions is pretty intuitive. You can tell if your angle to the runway is good or bad pretty easily and just adjust the throttle.…
> I think you could fairly easily talk someone through landing The bad news is that it is 10/28 (east-west) and the wind was reported from the north at 11 knots gusting 17. KPBI 101553Z 02011G17KT 10SM SCT042 SCT046 26/15 A student pilot with 20 hours of training probably wouldn’t have been signed off by his/her/zir/their instructor to operate in that kind of crosswind. From: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2022/05…
That’s neat and it does make it a bit more impressive. But an instructor who thought you had a 90% chance of landing without dying wouldn’t accept 10% risk and sign off, so it doesn’t say much about the overall odds.
But I didn’t realize he was flying a turboprop in crosswinds though!