Real pilot every day.
I am not joking, and don’t call me Shirley. Also, real pilot all the way.
Your best shot is to put the lightplane pilot in charge of the main controls - yoke, throttle, pedals - and make the simulator pilot “flight engineer” - in charge of keeping the thing in trim, getting the landing gear and flaps down when they won’t break and won’t flip the plane. I’m not sure you’d get a successful landing out of it unless the pilot is VERY good at staying in front of a fast, high-inertia airplane.
If the stick-and-rudder guy’s normal lightplane is a Mitsubishi MU-2 then he’ll land it.
It’s an entirely different kind of flying.
I sim fly 737s on a regular basis, and there is no way in hell I would consider myself able to land a real one. So I go with the GA pilot, though I might be able to help him find some of the buttons and switches etc.
I guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
The one who really knows the 747 (not just someone sayng he knows it). If he really knows the aircraft, he can be talked down by ground control, without wasting time saying “the red button beneath the dial that goes up to 500 to the right of the three toggle switches”. And oh, by the way, put the guy who has actually flown in the other seat.
Just a thought, but can’t many modern airliners be landed by autopilot?
So maybe the 747 sim-gamer would know how to set the 747 autopilot to make a landing, and wouldn’t need to manually land?
As a kid, and into my early 20s I had lots of simulator time on PCs. I am also a private pilot and regularly fly single engine airplanes. My dad was a 747 pilot.
I don’t think a PC simulator is anything like flying a real airplane. I also think that if I could talk to a 747 pilot over the radio, the autopilot was functioning, had good weather and a long runway with no crosswind, I’d have a reasonable chance of making a survivable landing. I don’t think that the simulator time helps at all.
I have also flown a real full-motion 747 simulator and did two approaches into (simulated of course) San Francisco. One of those landings was good and the other one I crashed on the runway.
Yes, it is called autoland capability and it works very well. Both the plane itself and the landing airport need to have the right equipment for it but that shouldn’t be an issue for any modern 747 over the continental U.S. or Canada. It would almost always have the range and the ability to land itself through autopilot alone.
It isn’t as simple as pushing a big red ‘LAND’ button but it is also not much more difficult than other computer tasks that people routinely figure out especially with guidance. I picked the sim flyer because there doesn’t need to be any hand flying in this case. The main skills required are the ability to navigate some intimidating looking systems and program the plane to do the landing on its own. Basically, you just need to be able to follow directions over the radio and know how to operate different user interfaces for the autopilot and radios. Professional pilots need to know a lot more than that but you don’t in this case because all other traffic will give you priority for the emergency.
I can fly small planes just fine in real life and I have thousands of hours of simulator time as well. It is the latter that would help me most in this situation because I wouldn’t be doing any hand-flying. ATC (hopefully with the help of a 747 pilot) would just tell me how to program the autopilot all the way down to an autoland at a nice big airport with a long runway. I wouldn’t even have to touch the flight controls.
How does the joke go again? The next generation of airliners will be crewed by a pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job is to feed the dog. The dog is there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.
Har har. But Shagnasty does make a good point. If what is required is to enter fixes and altitudes into the FMS in order to set up a Cat 3 autoland, I dunno. I think I’d at least be of some assistance to a GA pilot who’s never seen or used one before.
In such a situation, which would be preferable…an autoland on a civilian airfield, or a manual land on a big arse military base?
As an aside - in the final scene of F&F 6 where they drive the cars onto the military plane while it is taxiing - just how long would that runway have to be?
Ranking from Best to Worst
[ul]
[li]A veteran 747 pilot[/li][li]A green 747 pilot,[/li][li]An experienced large aircraft pilot[/li][li]Someone with hundreds of hours of supersimulator experience with an expert instructor.[/li][li]Someone experienced in small jets[/li][li]Someone with hundreds of hours of supersimulator experience but no time with an instructor[/li][li] Someone experienced with light propellar aircraft[/li][li] a steward[ess] who has been in stressful situations before[/li][li] Someone experienced with complicated systems[/li][li] A guy with a box cutter, a one way ticket and a quran[/li]And worst of all
[li] the guy with the laptop experience[/li][/ul]
I’d be interested (as ever) to hear the views of actual jet pilots (paging Richard Pearse and LSLGuy - don’t leave us up in the air :)). From what I’ve read on this board in previous aviation threads, I’m in the minority who voted for the sim guy. Shagnasty is spot on, I believe. As long as the sim guy can work out to use the radio (which he should be able to, as that will be part of the sim), he can be instructed by ATC how to program the auto-landing. A GA pilot who has literally never seen a 747 cockpit is going to need a lot more instruction and is more likely to do something wrong. I’m sure I read some experienced aviation person on this board saying something like a GA pilot with no jet experience has about as much chance landing a big jet manually (even with guidance) as a person with no flying experience at all - which is to say, an infinitessimally small chance.
I voted for the GA guy, but it really depends. I stumbled across a youtube video the other day of a sim guy demonstrating how to startup, taxi, and takeoff a BAe146, which happens to be the type I fly. The thing is, even though he appeared to know what he was doing, he had no real systems understanding and did pretty much everything wrong. Of course he didn’t know it was wrong because his simulator isn’t accurate enough to fail properly when you make systems errors. He thought he was doing a stirling job, but in reality, he burned out the engines within seconds of commencing the take off and he’d oversped the flaps before he’d lifted off the ground.
The GA guy is a crapshoot as well. Some might do ok, others struggle just flying a light aircraft. All said, I think I’d rather the guy with real aeroplane experience.
Edit: there are first officers that I would have reservations about handling a jet all alone, and they’re trained to do it!
Get me Ted Striker. I picked a bad day to quit methamphetamines.
Thank you, informative as ever and mighty quick as well!
Hijack: Guy with fighter experience?
Skillwise, I cannot say, but I think they’d handle the stress of the situation really well as they risk death or capture every time they take to air.
Reliably landing a plane on an aircraft carrier must be incredibly hard, so I’d at least put them above civilian small jet pilots.