I am not a pilot or aviation professional. But, it seems to me that a pilot swerving at nearly take-off speed will likely have a bad day.
The south end of the playa on which Burning Man is held is closed to the public, Zone 1, the city itself for a month before to a couple weeks after the event, and Zone 2, many square miles reaching as far as fifteen miles away from the city center during the event itself.
The Gate Perimeter and Exodus department controls access to the event and besides patrolling just outside the trash fence, has radar that scans the area. One famous anecdote, the operator watched a vehicle pass through the exclusion zone, which is permissible to reach the open playa to the north but this one stopped at Whiskey Springs and a half dozen people started walking south.
When they got about two miles from the fence they dropped and belly crawled. GPE sent a truck to intercept them just outside the fence and drove them back to Whiskey Springs. They were lucky; they could have been turned over to the BLM to face trespassing charges.
While an airport’s interior is a lot more cluttered than Black Rock City out by the fence ought to be open enough for radar to be useful there.
Yet there are a lot of people who crash their cars because they swerved to avoid some animal in the road, including something small like a squirrel, which won’t even damage your car or truck if you run over one. Deer are one of the deadliest wild animals in this country, not from bites or stings but simply because of all the people who swerve to avoid hitting one & then crash their car. Sometimes it’s hard to overcome instinct. Maybe it’s easier for a pilot than a driver because they’re up high & looking down on the person / deer on the runway rather than having them coming right at your face if you were sitting behind the driver’s seat?
We are trained to always stay on the runway center line. In large jets there may be very little leeway, but even in smaller planes you don’t want to be swerving. I’m not aware of any training scenario which encourages moving away from the center line during takeoff or landing.
Also keep in mind that the speeds at which we might encounter a deer (or person!) on a runway are probably higher than in a car. So the closure rate is such that swerving probably wouldn’t help, even if you could do it in a controlled manner.
I was trying to say that’s what one should do, whether in a plane or in a car. Unfortunately, many (non-professional) drivers don’t do that.
I am only speculating but it would seem to me that a pilot’s car driving instincts would not crossover to aircraft piloting instincts. Or at least it shouldn’t. I don’t think that I, a completely untrained non-pilot, would feel any instinct to swerve to miss something on a runway because that’s just not how it works in a plane. “Do not swerve a plane at speed” just seems obvious to me, I guess.
Really, I can understand wanting to go woth a bang, but don’t risk others at it.
Yeah, that, too. Especially at night at 100+kt by the time you’ve processed “oh f—k, person/wildlife!” you’re down to bracing for it.
I think this is key. The control response through the rudder is so sluggish compared to steering a car that it wouldn’t even come through as an instinctive reaction.
Have you ever had a deer sting? Ouch. That’ll learn ya!
This is a better way of illustrating what I hoped to suggest about ones instincts NOT telling you to swerve an aircraft, even in a situation where you might be tempted to swerve an automobile.
As I said, I think even a non-pilot’s instinct would not be to swerve. It’d be a (slightly) interesting thread/question in a similar vein to “Could a non-pilot be instructed to land a plane?” But instead “Would a non-pilot succumb to their car-driving instincts if faced with a situation like the human runway incursion in Denver?”
When I took my first flying lesson, I was kinda nervous. The instructor told me to taxi the plane out of the parking area to the runway. I had to turn left, so I reached forward, grabbed the yoke, and turned it to the left.
Nothing happened. I think a non-pilot’s car-driving instincts would turn out exactly the same.
(For those who don’t know, turning a small plane during taxiing is done with the feet. Push the left pedal to turn left, right pedal to turn right. As I understand it, large airlines have a small tiller to turn the nose wheel at slow speeds.)
I worked for a carrier that had a DC8 hit a deer with the nose gear. The deer lost.
That’s quite typical for new flight students. I used to bet my students that even after a thorough briefing on using the pedals to steer, they would at some point get hurried and reach for the yoke out of reflex. Totally normal until they get used to steering with their feet.
However, I had a handful of students who were non-drivers and they were not subject to this sort of interference. The one time I had a student who could taxi perfectly on the first attempt, it turned out the guy was a bulldozer operator. His machine was apparently steered by foot too, so he had no problem transferring that skill to the plane. Really surprised me until I found that out.
As for the steering tiller in larger planes… The first time I used one was in airline training and they gave us very little instruction. In my aircraft the wheel had to be pushed down for the mechanism to work, or “depressed” as they told us in class. So I started calling it ugly every time I began to taxi. 
Using a tiller takes a little practice. Very easy to over-control, but as with all things you get used to it. Most of the jets I’ve flown, you don’t need to use the tiller until the plane is fairly slow and you no longer have sufficient air over the rudder for steering. During takeoff you can come off the tiller fairly early in the roll and use the rudder, which is helped by starting out straight on the center line.
All of these would be very new reflexes for a car driver trying to control a plane. Without some sort of prior experience there would be multiple opportunities for it to go bad.
I saw a picture of a trainer that Boeing built to train pilots how to taxi the 747. The pilot sat so high, and ahead of the nosewheels, that they wanted a way for them to practice steering on the ground. I had an old Volkswagen bus where the driver seat is over the front wheel. It definitely took some getting used to, especially parking lots. It almost feels like you’re driving past a parking space before you turn the wheel.
I’m kind of amazed by planes like the Concorde or XB-70, where the nosewheels are well behind the cockpit. From the pilot’s POV, they probably go past a taxiway before steering to it.
Yep. The 707 & 727 were a lot that way. The 737 was / is less so. The DC9/MD-80 has the nose gear just about directly below the pilots’ butts.
All widebodies are that way. The L1011 was especially so, the DC-10 a bit less. The later A300, 310, and 330, plus the Boeing 757 & 767 also have a bunch of nose overhang.
Taxiing any big jet is an exercise in applied geometry done very consciously. The center stripe on the taxiway is nice, but it defines the center of where you want the middle of your airplane. If you just drive the nosegear along that line in a turn, you’re going to end up with mains inside the turn. If you just drive your face along that line, you’re going to end up with all the gear, nose and mains, inside the turn. How much you can be inside the turn and not end up in the mud varies on the size of the airplane, the width of the two taxiways, how sharp a turn, etc.
I hope the opposite isn’t true, and that experienced private pilots don’t instinctively attempt to steer their cars using the pedals!
Interesting article on a company making good progress on fully autonomous flying as a retrofit into existing aircraft. The article is free until May 29.
Company website:
Great article. Thanks for sharing. The article kind of jumps back and forth between this being the last flight of the last private 727 and this being the last flight of one of the last private 727s. Probably one of those facts that gets real elusive when you try to pin it down.
The plane’s registration is in Bermuda.
I think I saw that airplane a few years ago at KPBI = West Palm Beach International here in Florida. This had to have been between 2019 & 2023, and probably near the middle, so say 2021. I didn’t then notice the registration that I recall, but that paintjob is fairly distinctive. And private 727s were always rare birds, but especially so by that late date.
I had to refresh myself on what aircraft John Travolta owns. It looks like he has both a 727 and a 737 in BBJ configuration, plus a Bombardier.
Last operational 727 I saw was the Mexican federal police one at Mexico City airport. It was there when I passed through in 2022, but I’ve read it’s no longer in service.