Couldn’t find a cite right away but a blind woman landed a small plane after the pilot had a heart attack and died. Pretty sure it was in New Jersey, in the 80s I think. The pilot handed her the mike before he died. They sent up a chase plane of the same type to give her very detailed instructions on just how to find and move the controls and got her down in an open field.
I considered doing a Baker’s Dozen once of fictional instances of people doing this, but thought it might be too difficult. It’s happened in two books I know of (Blind Flight by Hilary Milton–in which the passenger who must take over is 13 and blind and has someone talk her down, and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen–in which the passenger is 13 and sighted but has nobody to talk him down) and The A-Team, The Incredible Hulk, Quantum Leap, and Voyagers! on TV. Also, didn’t it happen in one of the Airport! movies?
I think Desert Nomad’s predictions sound about right.
I got my PPL 30 years ago, and pretty much stopped flying at about 100 total hours. Landing is hard (often literally), even in good weather. It takes a lot of concentration and, for lack of a better way of saying it, muscle memory - instinct that has been drilled into you over a hundred or more landings.
A person who has never been a pilot will be confused by operating in three axes, by the G forces in certain maneuvers, and most of all by the need to do a bunch of movements simultaneously and in coordination. As my flight instructor said, flying is about Planning, Timing, and Coordination, and the newly-minted student pilot will be abysmal at all of these.
And if/once they’re on the ground, steering with their feet will be another alien concept that will likely end up in a flip.
Not quite. In Airport '75 a 747 collided with a small plane and incapacitated the flight crew.[sup]*[/sup] One of the flight attendants did a couple turns and flew the plane over some mountains. Then they lowered Charlton Heston into the plane from a helicopter and he landed it.
- Incapacitated both flight crews, really. but the small plane was just a smear on the windshield of the jumbo by that point.
As I’ve noted here, before, I did the same experiment as the Mythbusters, back when I was a tween, and I successfully landed a 747 or 737 (I don’t remember which).
That is in a simulator, with no extra insanity going on and no nerves, but I did land it safely.
If there’s even one person onboard that has ever flown a plane (e.g., a Cesna or something), I think you’d be pretty set to land it if someone on the ground could tell you what buttons to toggle.
I fly business jets, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to slightly re-frame your question to:
"If you were talking someone down in a plane that is equipped with significant automation, how much of it would you have them use?
The plane I fly is a mid-sized business jet, and it has a lot of automation capabilities. But contrary to what the non-flying public often imagines, the plane does not “fly itself”. Rather, setting up and managing the automation in itself is a major workload, requires a lot of know-how, and is not very intuitive. So if I imagine a non-pilot forced to attempt a landing in my aircraft, I’d have to think carefully about what to have them do.
Consider…
While my jet can fly a coupled approach (meaning, it can fly a glidepath toward a runway on auto-pilot), it does not have “auto-land”. Very few planes do, and even then that capability is only usable at certain airports. Leaving that aside, the steps for configuring a basic coupled instrument approach would be nearly indecipherable to a non-pilot. I suppose I could talk someone through it by rote, but it would take time and any mis-steps would be problematic. And while we’re doing that, the plane would still be in flight. Possible, but very challenging.
My jet is relatively easy to hand-fly, and doing that would obviate the need for complex inputs to the avionics. However, hand flying also assumes certain settings have been made (particularly to the auto-throttle, which is usually still active even without the auto-pilot).
So assuming I’ve decided to have them turn off the autopilot and hand fly toward a runway, then we’d have to complete a few other steps like lowering flaps and gear. That’s do-able, but the problem is once you’ve undertaken major configuration changes like that, you’re pretty well committed. It would be asking for trouble to have a non-pilot attempt a go-around or balked landing, or even go back to a clean configuration. So that means you’re now performing a one-shot landing attempt in real time.
I’ll assume we’ve found a very big runway, say 10,000 feet or more. My goal would be to have them fly it on, thump it down and reduce the throttles to idle. That’s do-able. But where it would go wrong is controlling the plane after touchdown. Anyone who’s taken flying lessons knows that steering through rudder pedals is challenging to the uninitiated. And my plane has a tiller on the side for steering, too. Wouldn’t even have them touch the thrust reversers.
I guess I’d just tell them to stand on the brakes and hope. I wouldn’t bet heavily on a good outcome to this. Decent possibility of getting it to a runway. Not great odds for walking away without their hair mussed.
Yes. Provided the runway is equipped with an ILS and the jet is equipped with auto land (most are) you could talk someone through setting up the autopilot and flight management computer for an approach and landing. Bonus points for something with auto brakes.
The challenge is that the person on the other end of the radio has no good way of confirming that you’re doing everything correctly.
Sage Rat presumably you had someone next to you talking you through the landing. That’s a lot easier than trying to do it remotely.
Could the pilot text a photo of the instrument panel to an expert, to verify that all of the dials and lights look like they’re supposed to?
Landing a plane conventionally would be a challenge. Landing a plane like it was a car would be doable. You would need to teach the person one thing and that’s how to manage airspeed. too slow and it falls out of the sky and if it’s too fast then structural failure occurs. Teach the person flying to trim the plane at 75% power and it can be pushed to the runway on a long descending pattern. No need to flare. Just plant it on all 3 wheels and shut it down. pedal steering could get ugly on the ground but at that point a wreck is survivable.
While that is an excellent thought it would be hard to make it work work unless it was trimmed out in smooth air. it goes to hell in a hand cart pretty quick if you don’t stay on top of things. The easiest thing for a person to do, even if they’ve never flown, is make basic maneuvers like turning and altitude change. I’ve walked many a person off the runway into controlled flight and they did just fine with basic instructions. they don’t need gauges to tell them they’re turning or descending.
Really the only instrument that matters is the air speed indicator. A tower can give instructions on which way to turn and whether to climb or descend. The object in this scenario is to get the plane close enough to a large runway that they can see the plane and the pilot can see the runway.
If it happened in the southwestern U.S., just send them to the dry lake at Edwards.
Somewhat. There was someone else in the co-pilot seat. The guide was behind, out of my vision. He couldn’t point at whatever I was supposed to toggle, but he could verify that I had done the right thing. I think I did the wrong thing once and the plane refused to do it or alarmed or something. Otherwise, his ability to verify that I had done the right thing was not a real factor, and the actual landing is more a matter of not steering the plane into the ground than it is one of pressing the right button at the right time (unless you’re just putting it into auto-pilot 
).
My guy had to do it while we were heading down, in a plane run by a teen that was going to land it or crash it without hesitation. In a real world situation, with an adult flying, if you couldn’t find what you were looking for on the panel, you’d just fly a circle until you’d figured out all the main buttons and the general procedure before heading downward. You’d probably have a second person with you to help keep everything straight.
Or you’d just put it in auto-pilot and be happy.
Yes. That will work for things that need to be setup but aren’t dynamic.
The primary flight display has most of the needed information in one place.
What I mean is that someone in the flightdeck with you can see and feel in real-time exactly what the plane is doing. They can give instructions and immediately know if the right things are happening and if it is not right they can give immediate corrections. This feedback loop is not available to someone sending radio messages and it makes a huge difference.
Imagine teaching someone to parallel park over the phone vs being in the back seat.
" Guess I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. "
I meant to add:
In the picture you can see the autothrottle is engaged and controlling to the selected airspeed of 146 knots (A/T IAS). There is a valid ILS signal. The autopilot is engaged, maintaining altitude, and tracking the ILS course (AP ALT LOC1) . The autopilot is ready to capture the ILS glideslope (GS1 in white). Flap 18 has been set (implied by the yellow speed limit lines on the speed tape). The selected speed also implies that the gear is down.
You could talk the surprise pilot to this point with no time pressure at all. from here there are only a few things they have to do. They have to select flap 24, the speed to 136 knots, the flaps to 33, and the speed to 121 knots. After that they can watch the plane land itself. There are no auto-brakes on this type but the automatic spoilers are very effective, and they could leave the plane to do most of the landing roll down to about 60 knots then step on the brakes to do the final stop.
The problem is that if something goes wrong along the way, the surprise pilot won’t have the knowledge or skills to fix it and the remote pilot won’t have the time to fix it.
Not if the phone is in Airplane Mode!
Interestingly, I don’t see the actual altitude anywhere on that display. Is that in approach mode, where the radio altitude and rate of descent are considered more important?
You might bend it…
Na, it just doesn’t have altitude on the PFD. It’s probably not quite a big enough display to have it.