Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, even if he’s dragging Walton and Lanier behind him.
Couldn’t he just dangle his legs down, hold the plane in his hands and walk it to the destination?
If Karen Black isn’t on board, perhaps then a small boy whose parents may or may not be divorcing. Provided Pernell Roberts is there to talk him down.
Can the OP clarify a little about what he considers to be a simulator? Real world commercial simulators will have the exact layout of a 747 and are highly accurate. A person who is familiar in there would be my first choice because they know exactly what they’re doing. Microsoft Flight Simulator on the other hand looks nothing like the real thing and would be worthless as a trainer. If you’re running on the laptop it implies a low end simulator. No good.
As a long-time flight sim gamer who later went on to getting a pilot’s license…
I’d pick the pilot always. From my experience with a few thousand “simulator” hours (MS Flight Sim, Warbirds, Aces High, Falcon 4, Flanker 2, Longbow, and many other ‘hardcore’ sims):
Cons:
Bad habits developed with no one to correct them. If I crunch my landing gear or scrape a wing tip in a sim, no one cares. Checklist? What checklist? Thunderstorms are so pretty! That’s where you hide from the huns!
2D screen does very little to prepare you for 3D real world. Objects in reality are closer than they appear 
Quiet computer room with low speakers is different than a deafening engine with dynamic light and shadow. Staring into the sun, or adapting night vision, is different in real life.
Carb heat? Does that give me more mission points if I enable it?
Can never hit ‘pause’ when things get stressful. I had to learn how to think ahead and correctly the first time.
Pros:
Controls and airplane behavior were natural (pitch, roll, rudder usage, throttling for altitude, countering torque, etc)
Basic maneuvers and navigation were easy the first time, instruments were easily understood once they were found.
Stall and spin recovery were natural.
I already knew most of the jargon, never went to fetch a gallon of prop wash or 100’ of flightline
Fly a Harrier or an Osprey, then you are getting into hard stuff to fly IMO.
If a pilot has not ever gone from light to a noticeably heavier aircraft has not dealt with what mass does to how an aircraft behaves.
Getting a day good nuff for anyone not rated so to speak to land a 747 is a rare day indeed. Add a need for a lot of runway, a cool head and mega tons of luck.
Like big ships, big airplanes are positioned more than they are driven / sailed / flown as is smaller craft.
+1
Also, poles like this are troubling: What of some Bright Boy or Girl gets the idea to introduce “Pilot Assistants” to do the job of pilots/ co-pilots at $10 an hour with a shiny certificate and a free copy of Flight Simulator?
“The head of the airline was quoted as saying, “Well, we have to cut costs somewhere to remain competitive.” Reporters tried to ask him to clarify his statements, but he give no further statement beyond that he was late for his train.”
Hasn’t the head guy from Ryanair already made some suggestion along these lines? Something about replacing the FO with a specially trained member of cabin crew?
Of course, that guy’s kind of…a troll, I suppose.
I’m with the minority on this one. There’s no way in hell I’d want someone with nothing but simulator experience trying to manually land a 747. But autopilot and setting the controls to land the plane? I would prefer someone who’s familiar with the cockpit layout and instrumentation, and that gives the edge to the flight sim guy for me.
I’d also assume that someone who’s spent that much time with a flight simulator has plenty of experience understanding ATC communications — at least enough that it wouldn’t be a hindrance for this emergency purpose.
Do you really think Microsoft Flight Simulator teaches anything about actually flying a plane? I’d take an ultralight pilot over an ms flight sim junkie
I’m not sure if this was directed at me, but yes, I do. I used the program for a while before I took my first few flight lessons, and I found it really helpful in terms of being familiar with some of the controls and instruments. Which, for the purposes of this hypothetical, would be a good thing.
People like to think and discuss about this kind of thing but be damn glad it is hopefully always a hypothetical…
Don’t under estimate the accuracy of MSFS add ons. They can be very accurate in some areas, and if a sim dude took the time to actually learn the real procedures rather than some made up stuff that another sim guy has come up with, you could go a long way to learning the procedural aspect of flying the aeroplane.
I think it depends more on the person than what specific experience they’ve got. I’m sure there is someone somewhere with nothing more than simulator experience who could pull it off, and somewhere there is someone with GA experience who could pull it off.
It depends on what kind of GA experience as well. Modern GA trainers have a glass cockpit and someone who has cut their teeth on those would be more at home in a modern glass cockpit 747 than someone who’d only flown analogue aircraft. But what if the 747 is an old analogue version? The older analogue pilot might be more at home.
A simulator (even MS Flight Sim) is good for depicting the basic flight instruments well. But the actual “feel” of flying and controlling the airplane is impossible to simulate while sitting at a desk.
I’m a private pilot and don’t think that the PC simulators I have used have helped at all in the actual mechanical and physical control of the airplanes I fly. As to the above poster, I fly mostly with the old style gauges (since they are cheaper to rent) but have flown with a glass panel as well. I don’t think the transition from steam to glass is hard but I would imagine going the other way could be more difficult.
As I understand it, right now in some low-cost airlines the co-pilot is pretty much paying for his or her seat.
I don’t disagree with this in the slightest, but again, the hypothetical in the OP is about an emergency situation that involves getting to a major airport and landing. As several have pointed out, this can actually be accomplished without “flying” the plane at all.
Maybe. It depends which 747 we are talking about. I don’t think most 747-100s have auto-land, but most 747-400s will have it - the pilot sill has to configure it (most sims will not be accurate enough to depict this) and of course the gear and flaps are manual but those are easy to figure out.
Without auto land, I would take a GA pilot over a sim pilot every day. With auto land, I’d take a GA pilot almost every day.
I agree. Some people are underestimating what home flight simulators like Microsoft Flight Simulator X or X-Plane can accomplish these days. I agree that treating one like a game that you run on a laptop isn’t going to do much but it doesn’t have to be that way. Very few people have full motion simulators in their homes but there are plenty of aftermarket hardware and software add-ons that can teach procedures quite well and model individual aircraft models down to excruciating detail. You can even buy hardware radio, yokes, rudder pedals and stackable control panels.
Microsoft got out of the flight simulator business a few years ago and sold the FSX code to Lockhead so that they could use it for their own simulators and real pilot training. X-Plane is so good at modeling flight characteristics of even fictitious planes that the Department of Defense and aerospace engineering firms use it for testing before they build anything physical.
I personally have a reasonably powered desktop hooked up to a 46" TV that I use for my simulator along with rudder predals and a multi-function flight joystick. I also have software add-ons that enhance plane, weather, and aerodynamic realism as high as they can go. The 747 simulation that I have has 100% working controls. The autopilot is exactly the same as the ones that are installed on real models and it has autoland capability. You have to push every button, turn every knob and set every input to make it work just like you would in a real thing.
I just tried to do both an autoland and a manual landing in the 747 simulator. The autoland was frustrating because I hadn’t used that model of autopilot in a long while and hadn’t really thought through what I needed to do but it eventually worked just like it would in a real one. The manual landing resulted in the death of most on board because I am not used to planes that big in real life or a simulator. Maintaining a narrow speed window on approach was the biggest challenge because you have to think ahead of the plane and that just takes experience in that particular model. I just smacked into the runway at the end going way too fast and that was the end of that show.
They might not get paid much, but the FO is fully qualified to operate the aircraft.
Some 9/11 Truthers can’t accept that the hijackers managed to hit the towers. Shoot, in Flight Sim I had trouble getting that Cessna to NOT fly into the John Hancock as I pulled out of Meigs.
FTR, it was awesome looking down out of a 102nd floor window in the Sears Tower and watching the bizplanes take off and land, way down below.