I wonder: do these people get to put the time in the cockpit in their logbooks?
This.
It’s nice to have some run the radio stack which involves changing frequencies for the radio, transponder and maybe the direction heading bug (or the airline equivalent). As the next frequencies are given the co-pilot will dial them into the 2nd radio so it can be flipped by the pilot as needed.
Going through the pre-landing checklist allows the PIC to fly the airplane. It also puts pilot redundancy back in the cockpit. You’d be surprised how useful a 2nd pilot is in a small plane and that is magnified as the complexity goes up.
61.51(f) covers logging second-in-command flight time. It refers to the aircraft’s type certification requiring more than one pilot.
61.31(a) lists aircraft for which a type rating is required:
- Large aircraft (which is defined as maximum certificated takeoff weight of over 12,500 pounds
- Turbojet powered airplanes
- Other aircraft specified by the FAA
There are some Cessna Citations that are approved for single-pilot operations, but being jet powered would require a type rating.
Thanks, Mach Tuck.
I knew at least some Citations could be flown by single pilots. (IIRC, Lears require two.) I must have just assumed that weight was a determinant for single/second pilot operations, but it looks from your… ‘Citations’… that it’s a function of how the aircraft were certified.
She was acting as Second In Command, so I think so. She didn’t need a current medical or flight review since she wasn’t PIC. Not sure if she could log the time as SIC without being type-rated, though.
To expand on that, you only need a Commercial license and a Second Class medical to be an airline first officer. Only to act as an airline captain do you need an ATP and a First Class.
A flight attendant needs a Third Class aviation medical, btw - s/he’s a required crew member.
Nope. Unless she’s type rated in the aircraft, she couldn’t log the time as second-in-command. In that situation she was simply assisting the pilot.
Most modern commercial jets can land on auto pilot. If you can get on the horn to talk to someone they can talk you through programming it.
It takes a cat III landing system at the airport along with a matching cockpit.
If the pilot and co-pilot are incapacitated, and someone with no flying experience is at the controls, I’d say that warrants diverting to a cat III airport.
Actually, in a case like that, I’ve always wondered if they could re-direct the plane to the dry lake at Edwards Air Force Base. There’s oodles of room in every direction, as long as you come down wheels-first.
Flight engineers are pretty much obsolete. The 747-400 was released in 1988, and is piloted by a crew of two.
Any large jet can be landed by a single pilot. No country would certify a jet for passenger operation that could not be landed if one of the pilots were incapacitated. However, the workload on the pilot would be higher than it would be without the copilot’s assistance. Despite all the computerization and automation, large jets are still very complex machines, and navigating the air traffic control system is itself complex.
Overworked pilots are more likely to make mistakes. Chances are, the plane would still have landed safely if the FA were not available, but the risk of an accident would have been increased nonetheless. Conscripting the FA to assist the pilot helped minimize that risk. That doesn’t mean that the pilot was incapable of landing the plane himself - just that commercial aviation safety is all about minimizing risks.
That said - if I was the pilot, I would have a hard time deciding if I trusted the flight attendant enough to actually depend on her to reduce my workload, or if my workload would actually be increased by having to tell her what to do and ensuring she doesn’t make a mistake.
This story could easily have ended up with a crash, and instead of a cheerful MSNBC article, a terse NTSB report in six months saying something like:
The FAA makes a big deal about teaching crew resource management (CRM) at all levels of pilot training. One of its tenets is that a pilot should be aware of, and use, available resources both inside and outside the cockpit. It should be noted that a “crew” can be a single person. In the case under discussion, the guy flying the plane became a crew of one when his partner was taken ill.
Commonly listed examples of resources include documents in the cockpit, air traffic controllers, mechanics or other pilots who can be reached by radio, and… non-pilot passengers. Had the pilot NOT availed himself of help from someone like the flight attendant, and something bad happened, the NTSB could very well have faulted him for not following good CRM procedures.
Now that doesn’t mean he has her read the approach plate without his double checking it. It does mean that she could do various non-critical tasks under his direction, thereby reducing his workload, which seems to be exactly what he did.
I’ve been in this situation myself, though far less dramatically. Flying an under-equipped aircraft in bad weather, I’ve had passengers locate and hold maps for me, change radio frequencies, etc. I’m still in charge, just using available resources.
The plane itself was fine - there was no emergency with regards to the equipment, which means when the plane arrived at its destination it had enough extra fuel (enough to divert to one alternate airport + some amount of time) to take the time to report the crew emergency to ATC, get clearance to enter a holding pattern and take the time to familiarize the flight attendant with exactly which tasks she would be charged with and how to do them before requesting clearance to land. Depending on the attendant’s level of knowledge, this could only take a few minutes (and might not need the plane to hold).
Also, the airport would have been on alert that a plane is making an emergency landing, and so once on approach, it would possibly stop all ground movements and request air traffic to yield right-of-way per ICAO standards to the incident aircraft, thereby reducing the risk of collisions or resolution advisories on approach and landing. The goal is to get the plane in distress down safely, rather than making sure other planes take off exactly on time.
Not really. I’ve flown about 1500 hours single pilot multi-engine IFR. Nearly all of it was done with a non-pilot crew member in the other front seat. The crew member usually read the checklists in addition to their usual non-flying duties. It wasn’t always perfect but it was always a lot easier and safer than trying to read the checklist myself (I personally believe that memory is safer for single pilot flying than trying to run a checklist, but I fear most of the industry doesn’t agree.)
ILS frequencies shouldn’t be blindly accepted by any pilot, regardless of who is giving them the information. In our company each pilot in a two-pilot crew is required to independently retrieve and set all radio and navaid frequencies. If the captain in this event had accepted a bad frequency then it is entirely on him and really has nothing to do with the person next to him, an FO is quite capable of screwing up frequencies too.
I was the FO on a flight when the captain became incapacitated, in the end he was able to fulfill his duties as the “pilot monitoring” but if he had not been able to, I would’ve preferred having anyone in the front seat to help out. Our aircraft can be quite easily flown by one person, but if there’s help available, you use it.
Dealing with an incapacitated crewmember is part of our initial simulator training at my airline. Despite having entered training as a moderately experienced pilot, I felt busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest when tasked with handling a somewhat unfamiliar aircraft solo into some of the busiest airspace in the world. Everything got done, all checklists accomplished, and made a safe, standard landing, but the flurry of activity was less than… ideal. The level of automation required for the mythical “autoland” does not exist for my aircraft.
If I had had someone just to handle radio transmissions/tuning frequencies, that would have reduced the workload significantly. Of course, since simulator instructor pilots are the sadistic spawn of the devil, carrying out His work, no “virtual” flight attendant was available to me. 
It’s not that unheard of - one of the local instructors at the flight school nearest me is a flight attendant for United Airlines. I never asked him which came first. But there’s another example of a flight attendant with a commercial license.
In the Helios Airways Flight 522 accident in 2005 after the two pilots were incapacitated a flight attendant who also happened to have a pilot’s license (though was not licensed to fly such a large aircraft) attempted to fly the airplane, but is presumed to have succumbed to the same thing that incapacitated everyone else on board. So it’s not just an American phenomena, either.
In the US getting a commercial rating isn’t that big a deal, and I’ve bumped into any number of pilots who have them who do something other than fly as their primary means of making money. For a while I pursued one for the challenge, not because I had any real desire to work as a pilot (but did not finish that project - I decided I wanted to fly tailwheels and vintage airplanes more).
You are assuming that
- The aircraft in question had an operable Cat III system
- It would be practical to divert to a similarly equipped airport (this will not always be the case due to factors like weather and fuel)
- An untrained person would have the ability to use said Cat III system.
It’s not like you can call ATC and say “help me program this Cat III landing” - ATC does not fly airplanes, they aren’t trained in airplane systems (well, most of them aren’t - there are a few air traffic controllers that are also pilots, but they’re rare and there’s no guarantee you’ll have one available in such a situation, or that he’d be be at all familiar with the particular aircraft you’re flying), and the best they could do is ask around to see if any pilots that ARE trained/competent in that particular aircraft and system just happen to be listening in and could maybe help you. Maybe. Those magic autoland systems require more than a single button-push to get them to work, you know.
Again, you’re assuming they have enough fuel to get there…(and that’s just for starters)
Even if they did - you can still bollix a landing on flat, dry ground in a spectacular manner. Sure, it’s an idea and I could envision a circumstance where that’s your best chance at survival but hey, don’t get the idea survival would be guaranteed. Hell, plenty of professional pilots have died on those salt flats due to unforeseen problems!
Or maybe they two of them had worked on the same flight crews for years and thus the pilot knew the FA well enough to have some trust in her.
Ultimately, it’s up to the pilot in command how much a passenger-assistant would be given to help out. Clearly, someone with pilot training will be more helpful than someone without pilot training. It’s up to the PIC at the point in time Something Happens to make that call, based on whatever information/resources he or she has.
A small point about the airport side of an autoland system, physically any ILS will do, legally the ILS needs to be certified to CAT III. If you were really in trouble, and had decided it was the safest option, you could do an autoland in a suitably equipped aeroplane at an airport with a standard ILS. There was a jet that did this into Perth some time ago, the strip was covered in fog and the aircraft didn’t have fuel to go anywhere else. The options were to ditch with hundreds of passengers on board, or do an autoland on a non-certified ILS, they did the autoland.