In some old movies or tv shows (don’t remember exactly which) there were scenes involving someone on a plane–not a pilot–landing the plane based on instructions from someone else on the ground.
Today I flew in a 737 from DFW to Orange County. If the pilot and co-pilot had both gone out of commission somehow, and I had been the only other person on the plane, is it at all plausible tha I might have been talked through the landing process?
-FrL-
This question has come up here before (not that it shouldn’t again) and I think the consensus of opinion (including the opinion of some pilots) was that:
-If the plane has fully automated landing equipment, the question is moot
-If the surrogate pilot is completely inexperienced, about the best that could be hoped for would be a crash in which not absolutely everybody dies.
It isn’t completely moot. If both pilots were incapacitated suddenly, someone would need to activate the autopilot which is more complicated that your average DVD player rather quickly. Once that is done, setting up the autoland is even more complicated. There is even more to know for that. There is not a big button that says “LAND” that a novice could push. I suppose that if the autopilot could be turned on, someone from the ground could coach activating the autoland capability.
My hobbies are taking flying lessons and playing with flight simulators. I like to think I could land an airliner (poorly) if I had to but professional pilots have said that it can’t be donw without extensive experience in airliners themselves. Regular amatuers wouldn’t even understand approach speeds, stall speeds, and appriate descent attitueds. Most wouldn’t even understand rudder control versus aileron control.
I’ve got about 100 hrs solo time, and I really doubt I could get an ailiner on the ground safely. Someone without any previous flight experience? No way. Could they get it one the ground and not kill anyone? Not likely, but hey the sun shines on a dogs ass every once in a while.
There is way too many things that a pilot has to do to get the plane on the ground safely. As you cross the threshold of the runway, things happen real quick and if you screw up, no one on the ground will be able to see how you’ve screwed and tell you what to do to correct before the plane is a flaming mess.
If you take airliners out of the picture and go with small private planes, it is possible for someone with very little experience to land a plane, though not without significant risk of damaging the plane. My mom used to be a pilot and they had a program where they would teach spouses or others who regularly flew as passengers how to land a plane in an emergency. It was a 1 day thing, and was pretty well received, until one year someone crumpled the landing gear on one of the rental planes…then it was discontinued (that was costly).
It is much more possible with a small single engine plane that an airliner. The biggest differences being speed and height when you touch down on the runway. If you are doing a full stall landing, you basically level the plane off at the begining of the runway and try to hold it off the ground as the speed bleeds off. When the speed of the airplane gets below the stall speed of the plane, the plane quits flying and falls out of the air. Ideally, you want to have the wheels a couple inches off the pavement when this happens.
In a single engine private plane, your butt will only be a couple feet off the ground and your speed will probably be 40-70 MPH when you land. This would be easier for your average person to accomplish.
In an airliner, your butt could be 30 - 60 ft off the ground, which is very hard to judge for someone who has never done it, and you speed will be more like 120-150 MPH.
This might be a silly question, but in this day and age, why not? Whay can’t that sort of thing be set up from the ground, such that there is an idiot button which could either land the plane safely itself, or at very least allow somebody on the ground to control the process remotely with no further input required from the cickpit?
Just FTR, here’s the previous thread on this topic that I remember:
Could I Land a Big Airliner With Just Radio Assistance?
ETA: And hilariously, I just noticed that I posted in that thread also, with links to even earlier discussions of this topic. Apparently this is a hobby of mine.
It’s easier just to tell the co-pilot to have the chicken if the pilot orders the fish.
Seriously, how many times in history would such a button have been useful?
IAN remotely a pilot, but from what I’ve been able to glean, it’s a very complex process that requires a lot of accounting for immediate conditions, not least of which is the fact that every runway is different (some are proverbially difficult to land at).
Not a pilot, but I got to fly a Cesna 150 once, with a pilot seated alongside talking me through absolutely everything. He did the landing, because, as he said, “it’s SO inherently dangerous”. I would hope that with the fully automated landing system, they could talk me through setting THAT up…if I have to land the thing, we’re all dead meat.
As an analogy, I’ve been driving for 36 years, up to 6-ton trucks with a 2-speed rear end along with a manual transmission. But the guy across the road is an OTR trucker; he once let me move his truck in the driveway…no trailer and he’s riding shotgun, telling me what to do. We lurched around like nobody’s business at first…I’m just thinking the first ‘lurch’ in an airliner kills everyone.
… but if it saves the life of just one innocent child …
I once suggested here that there should be an autoland button that required a code to be entered. Once activated, the plane would go to the nearest airport with the ground autoland instruments and land automatically. No one would be able to reverse the process either. I figured that it would mainly be to deter hijackers because the pilots could activate it at the first sign of trouble and that would stop any threats like 9/11. Ideally, it would never be used although I suppose it could be used in this highly unlikely scenario as well. The airliner pilots and other aviation people hated my idea.
To answer your question, modern airliners often have the capability to fly themseles from the departure centerline to arrival runway centerline. However, that requires extensive programming by the pilots and isn’t automatic from that standpoint. Autoland systems are mainly there to assist in landings in very bad whether although every autoland system is tested often so you may have been on a flight where it was used and never even knew it.
The main problem is that there isn’t software that can choose an appropriate airport that is equipped for autoland. Also, this like the radios would be integrated so that they could contact the appriate ATC center and towers to let them know what is happening and to clear the airspace and runways.
There isn’t any technical reason why it couldn’t be done but any new innovation in aviation rquires mega-bucks and the perceived need is assumed to be very low.
(bolding mine)
Not having read that thread, maybe their reasoning was along the lines of something I’ve often wondered about service stations and convenience stores etc (and IANA late night cashier) where there are signs saying “STAFF CANNOT ACCESS SAFE”. I do wonder how the staff feel about that with the potential of looking down the barrel of a gun leveled at their head by a guy high on ice saying, “That sign is BULLSHIT, man! Open the goddam safe!” I suspect I’d like to be able to open the safe, and that the pilots might not like to have to say, “Sorry Mr Hijacker, sir, but I can’t reverse the landing process now initiated. Hey, nice bomb you’ve got there!”
I suspect you’ve correctly summed it up right there. I wonder if it would be possible to convince the airlines to force a change, not on probabilities, but on perceived probabilities - ie. would the travelling public be able to vote with their dollars by preferring a plane that had this feature, and forcing the hand of Boeing, Airbus, et al?
That’s an unfortunate end to what sounded like a really good program. But stopping it just seems like not giving people training in CPR because it’s expected that they’ll break a rib or two when performing CPR on a nearly-dead human.
That’s because very few airports have the needed ILS Cat III to do it. Most airports don’t have any ILS, those that do usually only have ILS, no Cat II or III.
I looked through the IAP books quickly and JFK has two runways, 4R/22L, BWI one, 10, IAD two, 1R and 19R, SEA two 16L and 16C. Even some of the bigger airports don’t have it, DCA for example.
I took a course with the people who design the IAPs and we talked a bit about the autoland, they told me it’s not used very often. I don’t think that there will be much of a push to install something at all the airports when it’s not needed.
There’s more on wiki.
My dad worked for a major airline and I got to fly a real 747 sim about 20 years ago for 20 min or so. I did 2 landings, one of which nobody survived 
and one which most or all would have… though the airplane would have been damaged.
If one had a good knowledge of flight even with little hands-on experience except in sims (full motion or otherwise) AND you had a very good spot to land (I am thinking Edward’s Air Force Base dry lake), then I think it’d be possible to put it on the ground in such a way that there is a good chance of walking away from it.
Wouldn’t it be better to land in water, e.g. just slightly offshore?
I am not a pilot, but I would guess that a water landing would be more difficult to pull off safely than on the runway. Remember what you’ve seen in videos of airline crashes, like that DC10 crash in Sioux City. That long slide, flames billowing out, maybe a spin or two. All of this kills velocity and momentum. It looks horrific, but it actually has a pretty good survival rate, for varying degrees of pretty good.
In a water landing without excellent altitude control, the plane is going to hit and stop on a dime. Going from 150 mph to zero in a second or two will effectively kill most everyone on board
In the commercial airplane business, airplanes have to be designed such that failure modes that result in a catastrophic event (significant loss of life, destruction of airframe) are extremely improbable (less than 1 E-9/flight hour). A friend of mine and I were screwing around with statistics once and figured that it’s not extremely improbable for both pilots to have heart attacks. :eek: