There actually is a slight delay in the response of the C152, but since it’s only a few seconds and you have no other experience to compare it to, you didn’t notice.
Well, yes, otherwise they generally don’t give you the license.
Personally, I think I have a better chance of successfully flying IFR (despite being a VFR only pilot) than of landing an airliner.
The “help” the tower can give you is pretty darn limited, unless one of them happens to have flight experience in the airliner in question. That would be exceedingly unusual. There is no requirement that controllers be pilots, and thus they may tell pilots where to go, but have absolutely no idea how the pilots achieves that end.
What I meant by that was, should it ever happen, is that someone with flying experience in a small engine plane will likely understand any instructions given to him/her, better then any regular passenger on a commercial jet would. But thanks for pointing that out.
Do you have a cite that says most airliners have an auto land feature? IANAPilot, but I do design Instrument Approach Procedures. When I was in training we were told that the only way to land a plane is one that has ILS Cat III capabilities, which many planes do not. I’ve just skimmed through our Northwest 1 book to find airports with Cat III runways and found four. During training they told us very few planes had the ability to land without pilot interaction.
The question about the number of commercial airliners with some type of autoland is harder to answer than it may seem. Both Boeing and Airbus have it for all of the major commercial jet airliners. However, the service life of a jet airliner delivered today is 30 years or more so there are a lot of older ones still around (those could have still had an avionics upgrade however).
Still, I think you underestimate the number of planes with autoland and their capability by a wide margin. Most newer planes have it and they are required to test it for certification at very regular intervals. Wikipedia says that the majority of large airport runways now have CAT 3b landing capabilities. The autoland capability isn’t just an emergency capability. It is used when weather dictates it. The system must be tested at certain intervals as well (I am having trouble finding the specifics of this as well but it is something like 1 - 3 times a month). You may have been on a flight that used autoland and never known it. Many autopilot systems can fly runway centerline to destination runway centerline including braking and reverse thrusting.
I’m going to have to doubt what wikipedia says, unless there is some other section of the FAA that deals with ILS systems and doesn’t make an IAP chart for them, then they come through the section I work in. I’ve gone through one book rather quickly, the northwest one book, that has around 150 different airports, and a third have some sort of ILS system, while only four have a Cat III system. Of those four each one only had one chart. So unless there is another way of obtaining ILS approaches that I don’t know about, then only and handfull of airports have them.
As I said IANAP, I am only a cartographer that makes IAP charts for the FAA. We have been trained by people who are pilots, control operators and I can’t imagine them telling us something different. We don’t have any pilots around the office any more or I’d ask one of them.
What if you have an experienced but recently blinded pilot in the cockpit with you? You’d have to do all the work that required sight, but he’d be right there for any tasks that require “feel”. And his doubtful grip on sanity shouldn’t affect his piloting skills.
I suspect the FIT will not be particularly C, with a pax at the controls.
For the puzzled: CFIT = Controlled Flight Into Terrain - a term often used when the whole flight crew is poking around trying to figure out something in the cockpit and nobody’s actually flying the plane, used to distinguish from equipment failures or oddball pilot errors like stepping on a rudder pedal while getting out of the seat and knocking the plane sideways. The net result is either flying smack into the side of a mountain or a long shallow slope into the ground. There have been more than enough accidents where everyone’s staring at switches and indicators trying to figure out if the alarm condition is real or not and nobody’s noticed that the plane is dropping closer to earth ever so slowly until someone hears scraping noises and screams “AGHHHH!!! TREES!! PULL UP! PUL” <crunch>
A retired airline captain friend who flew them, as well as a number of other types, tells me the same thing - and adds that it was the easiest plane to taxi and park of any he ever flew, too. He liked the high pay rate most of all.
First off I don’t think anyone could expect a novice to be able to cope with some strange in flight emergency. I think the Op is asking could a pax take over and land a plane in the case of a medical emergency knocking out the pilots.
Secondly, in the cases of CFIT, the flight crew forgot the first rule of Aviation. Which is don’t forget to aviate. Somebody has to fly the damn airplane.
Not to stray too much, but it doesn’t matter what Wikipedia says. If the “article” is sourced, go to the listed source and find your information there. If it isn’t sourced, it’s unreliable at best.
For the hypothetical emergency situation posed by this thread, there’s no reason you couldn’t use a common category 1 ILS for autoland. If the pilots are incapacitated, the redundancy lost by using a cat I vs. a cat III will be the least of your worries.
A non-pilot or lightplane-only pilot trying to manually land an airliner, even an RJ, will crash 19 times out of 20. The 20th time he/she will still crash, but it’ll be more or less along the runway and there’ll be at least a few survivors
I haven’t flown a jet in a couple of years & if I found myself in that situation I’d plan on making a couple passes at the runway first to re-calibrate my eyeballs & hands. I’d spend even more time (if fuel’s available) if it was a type I’d never flown. Given that the newbie would have no clue about what looks right vs wrong, there’s not much calibration to perform.
Autoland is a possibility. Most big jets in service today have the capability. Not many of the RJs do; low cost and all that.
The major city airports all have at least one auto-land capable runway, so if you’re near a big city, that’s the destination to pick.
In a pinch you can try an autoland at an airport with non-autoland ground facilities; it’ll work fine down to maybe 100 feet and then things might go haywire or might not. The only way to know is to try. Still the odds are better than trying to land by hand.
Setting up an autoland is a non-trivial exercise in computer programming & systems operation. There are many, many additional required actions throughout the process that are not automated and must be done right and on time or else you quickly get so out of whack you can’t land and have to go around and try again. Assuming you recognize the situation as such.
If folks are thinking in terms of being up at altitude & pushing a button labeled “Boston” followed by one labeled “autoland”, that’s not it at all.
Finally, as explained in detail in other threads I & the other big jet drivers have posted to, the real challenges are 1) psychological, and 2) not losing control in the first couple of minutes.
Given a couple of hours in a sim I could teach a lightplane pilot to have a decent chance at hand-flying a landing in that particular aircraft type in good weather. It isn’t some magical super-human skill.
But it IS very real time & very different from anything a non-pilot or light plane pilot has ever done. And you are playing for keeps.
All of the above scenarios involve landing at an airport and presumably on a runway. Suppose that I’m on a Delta flight going to Salt Lake City. Do our chances of survival go up or down if I’m redirected to the Bonneville Salt Flats?
Non-current helicopter pilot checking in. I flew Cessna 172s before I started flying helis.
I’m convinced that a GA pilot would in all likelihood crash if he tried to land a heavy. But I, like most GA pilots, I suspect, have wondered how I would perform. We know the mechanics of flying. We know about turbine lag. We know that the cockpit sits a lot higher than a light plane’s and that the sight picture will be significantly different.
I’ve wondered if I could successfully land (i.e. not crash) a heavy if I could attempt the landing on Rogers Dry Lake. Screw the runway. I’d want acreage! If a GA pilot could get into a stable approach many miles long, and set up a very gentle sink rate with a relatively slow airspeed (faster than normal, but slow enough to deploy the landing gear), keep in mind the differences in handling between a heavy and a GA aircraft (and getting a little practice while manuevering onto final), and have huge dry lakebed to land on instead of a runway that’s only a couple of miles long and a few hundred feet wide, what are his chances of a landing that does not break the aircraft?
Not hypothetical at all. The lake beds at Edwards aren’t salt flats. At least, I’ve never heard them called that (and I lived in the area 11 years and worked there for four). Every Spring the lakebeds fill with water. The high winds wash the water around, making a very flat surface. When they dry they are quote capable of supporting large aircraft. The Space Shuttle used to land on the lakebed, as did (and do) many aircraft of all sizes. It’s also been used as an emergency landing area for transport-type aircraft.
I think a good private pilot, with an airliner on the ground to instruct him in the systems, could have a decent chance of landing an airliner if there is a precision approach radar at the airport. The radar controller could give the airline pilot the flight details (“slightly below glideslope, slightly to the left of centerline”), and the airline pilot could instruct the pilot in the plane what to do to correct. The trick would be to get a nice stable glidepath going from some distance out, trim up the airplane, and give the private pilot lots of time to prepare for the landing.
Out of curiosity would it be safer for a novice to deliberately go for a survivable landing rather than a text book one.
Ie deliberately crash in such a way as to enhance surviability rather than go for a
wheels on the tarmac and follow the central line attempt?
I’m thinking here of for example not even attempting to land on the runway but rather a water landing.
Also stupid though this might sound if it was likely that the ‘pilot’ couldn’t land the plane on the runway would it be safer to land with wheels up. Ie accept a runway landing isn’t going to be managed and simply aim to mitigate the loss of life
