Seems to me that restricting pilots from riding in the jumpseat is the wrong solution here. As it happened, there were two other pilots who could correct this guy’s actions, recover the airplane, and prevent him from doing anything else. If he had done the same thing when he was part of the flight crew, there would have been only one other pilot around to stop him.
Your Cub Scout Den Mother was clearly … different than mine.
Yeah…the guy is a legit commercial pilot. Riding in the jump seat was not the problem. He could cause as much, or more, mayhem sitting in the pilot’s seat.
US Attorney, no? I’m pretty sure any crimes that take place on an airplane are subject to federal jurisdiction.
It’s happened at least once.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/26/asia/south-korea-plane-door-opens-midair-intl-hnk/index.html
Passengers who try to open a door during flight are most often in the midst of an anxiety/panic attack and not thinking clearly; their lizard-brain is screaming “gotta get outta here RIGHT NOW.” That’s not attempted murder because they didn’t intend to kill everyone on the plane, they just wanted out for their own selfish reasons, and recklessly endangered everyone else.
A professional pilot who tries to shut down both engines during an otherwise-normal flight will have a much harder time defending himself against accusations that he intended to crash the plane and kill everyone on board. He knows what he’s doing.
That just means you’re not insane.
I believe physics prevents airplane doors being opened at altitude. There is thousands of pounds of pressure on them. No human could open one when the plane is at altitude. The guy in your article did it when the plane had almost landed. Scary, weird, but I don’t think dangerous to the plane as a whole.
You’d be surprised at the number of places where big enough airports aren’t close enough together to reach one.
The real problem isn’t that there are no airports nearby, but that you have no experience in judging how far you can get, how and when to slow down, etc. And with no engines you may be doing this using backup instruments, limited navigation capability, no flaps, manual emergency landing gear extension, etc. Whole lotta balls to juggle.
A big airline airport has runways a bit over 2 miles long. To get stopped on the runway means you need to control your touchdown point to be roughly in the first mile, but not short of that. So that means hitting a target zone that’s 1 mile long, zero feet of altitude, and within maybe -15 to +30 knots of your desired speed. Having any of those 3 variables out of tolerance when you get there and it’s bad.
If you start by aiming at one of the far more numerous smaller airports, your long / short window is reduced to zero or less. Running off the end of a municipal airport doing 50 or 150 mph might be better than landing in a nearby farm field or might not. Likewise coming up a half-mile long or short. Both are almost certainly better than landing in rolling hills covered in forest.
Sully very quickly made the masterstroke decision not to aim for any of the several nearby airports, but to aim for the wide, straight, and very long Hudson river, where he did not need to worry about touching down too soon or too late. That left him the much easier problem of being aligned, configured properly, and at a reasonable speed when he ran out of speed and altitude.
The other major issue is that from a point of engine failure you really have two very competing goals: 1) find an airport and glide to it, and 2) get the engine(s) running again. With a sub-task under 2) of figuring out why they quit and what that tells you about the likely success or futility of even trying.
Each of those is an all-consuming task for a few minutes. Yes you have two pilots and can have one working each task mostly independently. Except that for the best gliding range you want to fly slowly and descend slowly, but for best engine restarting you want to dive at high speed to windmill the engines to a higher RPM, and also typically they start better = more likely to succeed at a middle altitude (say mid 20 thousands) rather than way up there in the high 30s. So a restart attempt begins with pissing away about 1/3 to 1/2 your potential gliding range ASAP.
In all, a problem I’m glad I never had to face. Post Sully, there was a brief fad in the industry to spend a few minutes after a sim syllabus informally practicing low altitude forced landings. Pretty quickly it was realized that that really encouraged teaching dangerous cowboying more than it was teaching reliable repeatable success. So that got quashed.
I thought modern avionics tells pilots exactly how far they can glide (it draws a circle(ish…accounts for terrain) that shows how far they can glide). A small plane may not have that advanced equipment but I’d think a modern commercial jet would.
Not exactly. I’ve never seen the particular feature you’re describing, but it might exist on some airplane someplace.
It’s commonplace to have the avionics draw an arc out ahead of you that represents where your current vertical descent angle will intersect the altitude you’ve dialed in as your next level-off point. So if you’re over flattish terrain, and you know how high it is, you could crank your altitude target down to that and get a decent ballpark idea. Once you’re established in your stabilized glide at your chosen glide speed. But …
That arc assumes a constant descent angle to impact. And given that a power off glide consumes maybe 400-500 vertical feet per mile, if you misestimate the terrain elevation by that much, your arc is a mile off = greater than your touchdown zone tolerance on a big runway. Turning also consumes distance and altitude at a different, unknown, but guaranteed larger, rate.
Somewhere along the way you’ll want to deploy gear & flaps & slow from a best glide speed of maybe 220 - 250 to more like 120 - 150 for touchdown. What’s the net impact of those things on your range? The act of slowing will extend your glide, but configuring will steepen it. What’s the net? I don’t know. The later you do it, the smaller your variance, but those things take time, and doubly so if you need to use alternate deployment means for gear and/or flaps.
Thanks to LSL for the informative input and explanation of all the things that can/must happen if things go weird. I, as a passenger, will continue my contribution to a safe flight by pulling up on the armrests if things get bumpy.
This:
The need for a runway long enough was one of the key factors in the Gimli glider, if i recall correctly.
The pilots realised that they didn’t have enough time to get to Winnipeg, but one of them knew about the disused air force base at Gimli, which had a runway long enough to take a passenger jet, and were able to land it there.
There’s not a lot of major airports on the prairies, so if they’d not been in range of Gimli, they likely would have been looking at a farm field.
Landing in a field may not have been as bad as the Sioux City case, since there had not been any structural failure to the plane, but still …
…right into the middle of a drag race on the runways. 2 kids on bikes narrowly avoided being hit.
There’s a story for the parents.”What happened to your new bike?” “This big plane came out of nowhere! I swear!”
And iirc, said drag racers and fans raced over to the airplane with their car fire extinguishers, just in case.
This thread has me checking “Amtrak schedules” and “freighter passenger trips to Europe” with more than casual interest.
Cool. Thanks. I did not know about that.
Garmin’s doing some very advanced things that the airlines won’t see for 20 years, if ever. Same with their automated emergency landing system for single-pilot ops. There is a lot of software magic in, say, a 787 that’s not in earlier models I’m familiar with. I doubt it has that feature though; forced landings really aren’t in the airliner wheelhouse; the point is to have sufficient redundancy they aren’t required.
Pretty sure that first sentence should be in the past tense now. I don’t picture any airline being willing to employ this guy after this event.
In a current story, it seems that Mr. Emerson had had some kind of breakdown. I hope he can get some emotional/mental help, aside from the legal kind.
Sully, and everyone was very lucky that their where no boats in the way. THAT would be a boating accident to tell your friends. Provided you survived.