In my 40 years at Boeing, I performed a number of tests related to landing a 737. The only advantage I would have over an average person would be I know where all the controls and switches are located.
It seems to me this question was discussed on the Board once, some years ago. IIRC, one of our jet pilot members said that the probability of a total novice being safely talked down in a big jet was exactly 0.00
And yet airline pilots who once new nothing about aviation can be taught to land a 747 so it’s possible. My OP’s just a question of how long it would take to learn it well enough that there were zero fatalities in 50% of the landings (no where near the success rate that an actual pilot must have)
I know very little about piloting an aircraft. I don’t think I could learn to land a 747 during a sudden mid-air emergency with only 30 minutes of fuel.
However I do think I could likely learn it in a year, or 6 months or 3 or…?
And remember, it’s only landing (yeah, the hardest part), nothing else, and this 747 is well tricked-out in advanced auto-pilot capabilities (even if that needs to be a hypothetical since 747’s are pretty old at this point).
So again… how quickly? A month? A week? A day? Fourteen or fifteen hours or so (within the fuel range of a 747)? In my OP I ask if it can be done within a normal (albeit on the long-end) flight-time but if you don’t think it can happen within 14-15 hours or whatever how long WOULD it take?
14 or 15 hours of cruising flight won’t teach someone much about landing. You need to reconfigure the plane (lower landing gear and flaps), adjust the thrust for the right speed and rate of descent, line up with the runway and glide slope, flare, land, and stop. If you just want to learn to land, those are the things you need to practice.
If you really did have to talk someone down (and had plenty of fuel), the best bet might be to do a few practice approaches, getting lower each time, before trying to land.
And not all 747s are old. Boeing still has a few left to build before production shuts down next year, although I think all the remaining orders are for the freight version.
Oh Gods no. Every second the noob is in the air is a second they could screw up, and you want them to go around a couple of times? Maybe shoot some touch and goes? 
1 shot, straight in, take the Over on the body count.
“TOGA! TOGA! TOGA!”
Mayhaps a barrel roll or two? 
I was thinking that the first approach comes down to maybe 3,000 feet, then level off but leave the flaps and gear down, then fly a long traffic pattern to circle around for the real landing. But you may be right; every maneuver gets the pilot a little more experience, but is also a chance to screw things up.
I was reading the pilot’s handbook for a floatplane once, and there was a section on how to land on glassy smooth water. When it’s that smooth, apparently you can’t really judge your height above the water. According to the handbook, you trim the airplane for a certain airspeed and rate of descent, and just wait until you hit the water. I wonder if you could do something like that in a 747; fly to a dry lake or salt flat, set the plane up for a certain airspeed and descent rate, then take your hands off the controls and wait.
An interesting variation on a hoary question.
Let’s tackle a slightly different question. First, what is “landing?” And second, lets try this in a sim, not a real airplane.
If the sim operator sets the airplane up 5 miles out from the runway with gear & flaps down, on course, on altitude, on speed with the nav system and automation set up for autoland what tasks does the pilot still have? Answer: Sit on your hands until the airplane comes to a stop sitting on the runway. That’s real easy to learn to do.
For bonus points, at that point disconnect the autopilot and autobrakes and taxi off the runway to wild applause. Just push a couple buttons to disconnect and steer using the steering wheel and brake with both pedals. Not too tough, except for knowing which two buttons and knowing to use both pedals to stop. Unless you drag the gear through the grass misjudging turning something 200 feet long. Then you’re stuck in the mud and the crowd throws tomatoes, not roses.
Let’s back up 10 miles but still on autopilot and positioned correctly in 3D space pointed in the right 3D direction at a reasonable speed. Now what’s needed of you? Answer: You’ve got to set the automation to slow down maybe 40 knots, extend gear, extend more flaps in 3 or 4 steps but without extending each step too early/fast & damaging them and also not extending them too late/slow and stalling & crashing. You’ve got to push a couple more buttons to transition the automation from prepare-to-approach mode to prepare-to-land mode. You also need to know how to figure out what that target speed is, or where to look it up in the computer. And know to do each of these steps in the right sequence at the right time in the flow of the everchanging situation.
And so on. There are a hundred tasks to accomplish prepping for and executing a descent from cruise to landing. Knowing when and how to do each adds up to a lot of stuff.
A lightplane pilot at least has the benefit of some schema to stick all this detail knowledge into. A total non-pilot will be trying to memorize his/her lines in a very long & complicated play performed in a foreign language.
I figure 10 hours in a sim could bring a motivated non-pilot who’s good at trivia far enough along to succeed more often than not given nice weather, no traffic, no malfunctions, and a fully capable autopilot, etc. Doing it by hand-flying is a much taller order. As is correcting for miscues or getting behind the pace of events.
My usual comment in these threads is the job doesn’t take super-human skills or knowledge or aptitude. But the job is very, very, very real-time. You need to either keep up or die. It takes years of practice to get good at watching the right things at the right time and anticipating what’s going to be needed next at the pace events are being thrown at you.
Even pros can be distracted or confused to the point that things are happening faster than they can think. At which point they usually die, or at least bend a lot of metal. For an amateur as long as no mistakes are made, nothing is forgotten or done out of sequence or done wrongly, they could succeed in getting through the script unscathed. But the first goof will probably put them beyond recovery. There isn’t a universal do-over or undo button. The more complete we make the scenario, the more steps need to be done right the first time.
This guy seems to think it can be done. He makes me want to try it.
What say, LSLGuy? Put me in the cockpit and you go back for a beverage and let’s prove this guy is correct.
Say what? We steer planes on the ground with the steering wheel now? I’d have flunked that task right off.
And at the far other end of the complexity spectrum, landing a glider doesn’t allow for do-overs either. Learn to get it right the first time, every time, no go-arounds, and no practicing touch-and-goes for the student pilot either.
I saw a picture once of a device that Boeing built to train their pilots how to taxi a 747. It was a pickup truck (I think) with a special cab mounted well above and in front of the chassis, just as the flight deck of a 747 is above and in front of the nose gear. The idea was to give the pilots some practice in taxiing past an intersection (from their point of view) before turning.
I had heard that large airliners had a dedicated control for steering the nose wheels, but I don’t know exactly where it is. By the captain’s left hand, or the first officer’s right, I think.
That said, I bet if an untrained person ever did land a 747, the ATC would have them park on the runway and not risk driving it into the grass. They’d probably have to talk the civilian through the process of shutting down the engines and making it safe to get the passengers off.
I was being real generic (probably too generic) with my terminology. No, the yoke (or side-stick) isn’t used for ground steering; that’s still ailerons only.
As @Robot_Arm says, there’s a separate steering control for the nose gear typically mounted forward on the side panel. See Google image search for examples. I’d expect bizjets, regional turboprops, and anything larger to have this sort of arrangement.
The proper terminology is “nosegear steering tiller”. There’s always one on the left / Captain’s side and it’s an optional feature on the right / First Officer’s side on at least some aircraft including 747s.
Yes, the rudder pedals are also connected to the nosegear just as in a light plane. But they have very limited throw as would be appropriate for the high speed part of the takeoff and landing. Which means you can steer with your feet to follow a taxiway centerline along a straightaway, but a fully depressed rudder pedal could only make a very gradual railroad-like turn. You need the tiller to do any sort of ground maneuvering. The typical nosegear swivels around 70-80 degrees off center in either direction. Far more than in a car or a lightplane.
Wheel braking is just like a lightplane; forward tilt on the left rudder pedal to apply left main gear brakes and right pedal for right main gear brakes.
Are you calling me a hoar? 
Thanks for answering. I think you’ve covered a lot of the gist of the twist I was bouncing around in my head-box.
As you say – a lot depends on what we mean by “landing”, and the biggest issue probably isn’t learning the actual steps (“flaps to 30” (or whatever)) to goose the auto-pilot along until you’re safe on the ground.
The biggest issue in a real jet, in real air, with real passengers, real gravity, and really hard terrain is how many times do you get to practice? Which, to paraphrase Monty Python is: “Slightly less than one time.”
In the Terminus Est YouTube link somewhere around post 11-13 (why, Discourse, WHY?!?) we see the pilot guy talking a laywoman down by “radio”. She calmly follows his instructions and appears to have safely landed (in the simulator, of course).
Then at the end of the video it’s revealed that it took 20 minutes just to figure out how to work the radio.
By my score that’s:
Landing in a simulator after you learn the radio - 1
Landing a real 747 no matter how much time you have - likely 0
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ETA: Just thought of a story I could tell from my own career that could make for a barely interesting analogy to a commercial airline pilot’s career. Not enough mental energy to type it out right now, sorry.
I think you’ve got it. Besides the mental stress, the real problem with doing it for real vs the sim is that the pilot sitting behind you in the sim can instantly see any goofs in complete detail and offer new instructions to salvage the situation. A pilot on the ground guessing at what’s happening by what you can manage to say over the radio and the vague slow-updating radar data is in a much worse position to pull you back on the straight and narrow after a miscue.
But maybe next time?
Wow. Not a single “NEED ANSWERS FAST?” comment.
You guys are losing your touch.
The funny thing is that with the widespread advent of Wi-Fi on airplanes it now becomes plausible to actually ask and answer the question via SDMB. Not well enough to save the day of course, but not impossible either.
Part of the humor in “need answer fast?” responses is the fact you’re in a position to ask via messageboard means you can’t possibly actually be having whatever problem right now.
[Bolding mine]
That’s interesting. Why do you think that is? I’m pretty good at trivia (as I imagine 90% of the Dope is), what might that asset do for me in the ol’ simulator?
Ability to quickly learn and remember arbitrary facts that have no connection to one another. I didn’t say it, but somebody with a mechanical mindset would also have some advantage because they don’t stick their metaphorical fingers in their ears when told things like: “This is connected to that so when you do this input you get that output.”
There’s really two different questions here too: “Could somebody be taught to do the entire descent from cruise and landing on their own?” versus “Could somebody be taught to operate the radio and enough of the names & locations of buttons and control panels that they could reliably be guided step by step via radio with no idea why they’re performing any given action or what would be the next action?”
I didn’t watch the vid about the woman in the Airbus sim, but from comments upthread it sorta sounds like she answered the latter question, not the former.
Pretty sure I’ve seen that one, and yes, it was basically just about which buttons to press.
I had a look at the video linked here, which turned out to be none other than my favourite YouTube pilot guy Petter Hornfeldt who I mentioned in the Great General Aviation thread. As always, his keen interest in making sure his audience understands what is going on motivates him to explain why all the things you’re doing are necessary, but he keeps things to the minimum absolutely necessary to safely land the plane. It’s an interesting video. I ended up watching the whole thing.
Thing is, I don’t have a driving licence, have had a couple of lessons ever - 18 years ago - and still managed to drive and parallel park a car on a private road and car park every day for a couple of weeks (about 8 miles on a private estate). It was basically a matter of knowing where the controls of the car were (manual, not automatic), and not overhandling the wheel, and basically it was extremely easy even on my own. Driving a car is simple as hell. Driving around other road users is the hard bit.
Seems to me that’s like piloting a 747 into an easy landing with someone telling you everything to do.
But I wouldn’t have tried to drive on a busy street, or a motorway where I had to drive at speed and find the right turning on the right lane, or if the car had a flat tyre or engine failure.
If you wouldn’t want me driving your taxi then you wouldn’t want yourself flying a 747 either.