You Couldn’t Land the Plane in an Emergency, but You Could Try

According to a recent YouGov poll , about a third of Americans are either very confident or somewhat confident that they can safely land a commercial aircraft in an emergency, relying only on the help of air traffic control. (About 50% of men said they suddenly became first-class emergency pilots, compared to one in five women—read it all you want.) Obviously, this is a crazy idea, along with the idea that you can punch. the lion came out . Look at the photo of the 747 cockpit above and think about which button you would press first. Wrong (Crash)

Yes, despite the undeserved confidence of American men, almost all of you will break , at least according to an experiment conducted by The Washington Post . In the paper, six test subjects with different flight experiences were placed in a simulator with a cockpit identical to an Airbus A320 and then left alone to attempt a landing. Of the three untrained pilots, only one escaped the death of everyone on board, but even that success included a super-hard landing and a commercial plane rolling off the runway. And none of these tests were conducted in a real emergency, where adrenaline and panic would be as important factors as not knowing how the plane works.

As expected, test subjects with flying experience did better. Even the experience of actually flying in a small plane helps a lot, if only because you know how the radio works.

How to crash a plane

First, the good news: you will almost certainly not find yourself in a situation where you are the one who is expected to land the plane. A pilot who becomes disabled on a commercial flight is incredibly rare and there is a co-pilot on board to replace him should this happen. It’s a nerve-wracking experience for a co-pilot, but unlikely to be fatal. As far as I can tell, both pilots go down, requiring someone else to fly the plane, a situation so unlikely that it only happened once (in real life; for some reason, this has happened countless times in the movies). In 2005, both pilots of a Boeing 737 collapsed mid-flight, leaving a hero flight attendant (who turned out to be a student pilot) to fly the plane. There were no survivors .

For fun though, let’s just say you are the last hope of the passengers on your Spirit Airlines flight to Cancun. Make no mistake, you won’t be able to save the day, but at least your failure will be more admirable if you keep a few things in mind.

Things to remember when trying not to crash a jet airliner

The first thing to do if both the pilot and co-pilot are incapacitated is to refuse to land the aircraft. Even a flight attendant would probably be a better pilot choice than you, even if you’ve played hundreds of hours of flight sims on your PC. So spend your energy asking other passengers if they have ever flown on any aircraft. In a test run by The Washington Post, people with at least some real flying experience performed well, even the guy who flew small planes just for fun. There is simply no substitute for hands-on experience.

But if you really are the last hope, keep these tips in mind:

• Do not panic. Don’t start randomly poking buttons and yelling. Instead, calmly assess the situation and take a deep breath. You will not immediately fall out of the sky if the plane is just flying, because the autopilot is probably on. Talking about-
• Don’t turn off the autopilot. The amateur’s first impulse may be to grab the control stick. Do not do it. Don’t press the red button. Moving the stick turns off the aircraft control system. Enabling the autopilot will allow the plane to fly until it runs out of fuel, giving you precious time to pray. The autopilot systems of today’s jet aircraft can land the plane without a pilot, but only if you know how they work. Not that there was a button that said “land the plane.”
• Put on a headset/find a walkie-talkie : One of the characters in the Washington Post article didn’t think of it, and I probably wouldn’t either, but using a headset or handheld radio is vital to communicating with air traffic control. , and this is your only (very slim) chance of survival.
• Follow the instructions carefully. Air traffic control will guide you through the stages of landing the aircraft. This process is called landing the plane with a conversation. Listen carefully to all instructions and follow them to the best of your ability. This won’t ultimately help you land the plane, but it will make the air traffic controllers feel like they did their best to help you before you died.

Seriously, you can’t land the plane.

Even if you can easily find the radio without turning off the autopilot, you will not be able to land the plane. According to Patrick Smith, commercial pilot and creator of the Ask the Pilot blog, “A non-pilot has no idea how to use radio communications, let alone fly and land in an airplane.”

Even if the plane has already been configured for landing and lined up with the runway, you are still likely to die. According to Smith, even in this ideal scenario, “the odds are still very bad.”

“Where exactly is the aircraft from the runway in terms of altitude, distance and speed?” Smith asks (and I don’t know ), “How accurate are this man’s interpretations of what the plane is doing? A lot of it also depends on luck.

Has a passenger ever landed a plane successfully?

Although no passenger or inexperienced pilot has yet successfully landed a commercial aircraft, sometimes someone with no experience manages to land a smaller aircraft.

In 2019, a student taking his first flight lesson managed to land a plane safely after his instructor passed out. In 2013, a 77-year-old man who had never flown before landed a plane . Just last year, air traffic controllers safely brought an inexperienced passenger to the ground after she transmitted a distress call to them. But smaller planes are much easier to fly than jets, and these are rare success stories. Rookie pilot failure stories have headlines like “Four killed in Cessna crash” and it happens all the time.