Couldn’t find any cites, so I’d better ask – has this ever happened in real life? ISTR on Mythbusters they said it’s never happened, at least with a totally inexperienced passenger trying to fly a large commercial jet.
While this has happened at least once or twice in small planes (cite), nothing even remotely similar has ever occured on a large commercial plane. You can see why they don’t plan for it.
I am.
And don’t call me Shirley.
Well, if that one guy with a license is Rex Kramer, you might just have a chance.
Or you can just direct the plane into Lake Michigan, avoid killing innocent people on the ground.
I’m not discounting any of your post, I’m sure there are a million “ifs” in a situation like this*, but here is a case where a twin engine King Air pilot died on takeoff and a guy with a little flight experience in a single engine Cessna took over. It doesn’t say who had what role, but it says that Miami Center (radar facility) and Fort Myers (the airport they diverted him to) got a pilot on the line and relayed his instructions to talk him down.
So, although no one is trained and there are a hundred practical difficulties in it, it seems entirely possible for a radar facility or airport or both to get someone on the line to talk them through it. Doing it over the phone is not ideal, and if it were a large airliner it may make it impossible, but it seems that in a drastic situation, although there aren’t exact procedures in place, they would be able to do an approximation of Airplane! and find a way to get someone who knows how to fly involved.
*Of course, this was a much smaller, slower and simpler plane than an airliner. Talking an airliner through a landing would make this look like a cake walk. And of course airliners have two pilots. This has only happened a handful of times in small planes, the odds of it happening in an airliner with two pilots are pretty much zero so there are probably no procedures in place for this.
Here’s a case on a twin turboprop, where a passenger who happened to be a student pilot took over from a pilot having a diabetic event, and got the job done.
Hmmm… unless I’m misinterpreting, that sounds like the roller-coaster ride of a novice with a bad instructor doing his very first landing! 
Even in my earliest days of flying lessons when I knew almost nothing, I had learned to set up the approach so that all I needed to do was throttle down and maintain the right descent rate. Once you’ve set it up correctly, all you have to do in a small plane (mine was Piper Cherokee at the time) was gently nose up as the wheels touch the ground to put it into a stall, and you’re solidly on the ground. In fact the disconcerting part to a beginner was that the approach setup wasn’t intuitive – the glide path always seemed much too steep!
Which leads directly to how vastly different those parameters are in a large jet. A small-plane certified pilot would have to be talked down every single step of the way or he would end up either stalling 500 ft off the runway or directing the plane into the general direction of the earth’s core. 
Richard Pierce, about the fuel reserve issue… Isn’t that assuming that the plane will be landing at its intended destination airport? I would think that, if this situation ever came up, the experienced folks on the ground would be picking a landing site based on whether it has ILS, and what the terrain is like, and how close it is, but completely ignoring what the original destination was.
Sure. On short haul flying the destination is fairly likely to be the one you go to anyway though you might go to another if it was closer and more suitable. In that case you are correct that you’d have more fuel. Being closer is only useful up to a point. It takes 100 NM to descend from a typical cruising altitude and you’d use more distance getting ready. We normally start preparing for the arrival 150 miles out and the work load is fairly constant from then on. A novice would probably want 200 track miles at least.
A big benefit of going to the planned destination is that the flight management computer and autopilot are already setup to go there.
Don’t you start up with your White Zone shit again.
Why pretend? We both know perfectly well what this is about.
All right, give me Hamm on five, hold the Mayo.
ETA: I did not see page 2 before I wrote this. It’s sorta overcome by Richard Pearse’s subsequent comments and the responses thereunto. Sorry.
My original post un-retouched:
Richard Pearse who posted above is an airline pilot. IIRC he flies regional jets in Australia. His expertise is not to be ignored as his post seems to have been.
I drive big Boeings here in the USA. We’ve done this scenario unto death over the years on the SDMB. I’ll not search for you now, but I’ve written this post almost a dozen times.
Bottom line: If the two pilots drop dead and there aren’t any other jet drivers amongst the passengers, the rest of you are doomed, with about 99.5% certainty.
Long version:
First you’ve got to decide who’s gonna play John Wayne. Consider 300 terrified people & the high quality decision-making process about to ensue.
Then you’ve got to get into the cockpit. That door (at least the ones used by US-based airlines; I’m not familiar with other countries’ equipment) is flat-ass impervious. You are not opening it or breaking it down with any tools available in the cabin or anyone’s carry-on.
Then your pilot-candidate has to learn to operate the jet. Autoland is a nice concept, but it really ought to have been labeled “auto touchdown”. We have dozens of manual steps that must be performed at the right time and right place in space and in the right sequence to set up that last 2 minutes of automated bliss.
And only some airports have the corresponding ground equipment. Trying an autoland at a non-autoland runway usually results in a crunch at touchdown and the damaged aircraft ending up on fire in the grass near the runway. We should probably score that a “success” for this scenario.
Just learning how to fly in a straight line at a constant altitude using the autopilot is non-trivial. From there it just gets harder.
Next item: Every time any jet takes off, we start a countdown timer to our demise. It’s called the finite fuel supply. We carry enough to get where we are going, plus some slack for expected holding, plus some for a diversion if the weather at the destination looks sticky, etc. What that means in this scenario is that John Wayne may not have a lot of spare time to learn to be a pilot.
If the scenario occurs towards the start of the flight you’ll have however long it was going to take to get to the destination, plus maybe an hour. If your adventure starts towards the end of the planned flight, you may only have 45 minutes to get ready for the one last attempt before the fuel runs out & then you land … off-airport as we say.
I do NOT mean to say that only god-like Chuck Yeagers can be jet pilots. But I do say the job is very, very real-time and somebody who hasn’t been trained in it will not succeed at it. Pretty soon the jet will be handing you problems faster than you can understand they *are *problems, much less resolve them. And then you’re screwed.
If I was asked tomorrow to land some big jet I’d never seen the cockpit of, and I had an hour of spare fuel to practice with, and the weather & airport conditions weren’t too challenging, then I’d get the job done. As would 98+% of the world’s jet pilots. But I have some idea of what looks right, what doesn’t, and a methodology for wading into the unfamiliar waters.
Every time we train on a new airplane type it’s astonishing just how badly we fly that first sim session. Even after a couple weeks of living with the books and studying where all the knobs are, what they do, and mentally rehearsing the programmed steps for each event from pre-flight through shutdown, that first sim flight is a comedy of errors and incompetence.
When we’re flying a type we’re familiar with, airborne events seem to happen at a comfortable, familiar, almost leisurely pace. That first flight in a different jet sim feels like they’ve set it to 3x speed. Everything is rushing at us and we’re flailing to stay caught up. 3 hours later the sim’s slowed down a bunch. Or so it feels.
The first flight in the actual aircraft with actual passengers (and the other crewman with plenty of experience in the type) feels maybe 110% of normal speed with occasional bursts to 150%. And a month later the new aircraft feels like an old shoe.
But for somebody who’s never flown a jet, events are actually happening at about 5-10x the speed of freeway driving. And there are more of them. And you don’t know what they are. Or what to do about them. Your perception is going to be that stuff’s happening at 20x the speed of driving in aggressive traffic.
I do suggest that a skilled small-plane pilot could be taught, with a few hours in a simulator, to do a passable job in that specific aircraft type, again under non-challenging conditions. But the skills would not transfer well from, say, a 737 to a 767 or an Airbus. And he/she would fail utterly at jumping from a single Cessna to a Boeing without that sim training.
All the experiences you may have seen reported where some non-pilot gets a tour of a simulator and flies and lands that successfully should be interpreted about like this: A lot of 10 year old kids have sat on Dad’s lap and steered the family car across an empty parking lot or deserted road. Does that mean the kid was “driving”, or could successfully drive himself to school tomorrow? Even redefining “success” down to “survived the attempt and arrived near the school”? I’d suggest not many kids could pull that off cold turkey. Certainly plenty of farm kids are driving machinery both off & on roads. But not cold turkey.
Finally, do not underestimate the psychological challenges. Somehow you draw the short straw and get to be John Wayne today. And somehow you get in the cockpit. And somehow you & your helpers get a dead guy out of a seat without losing control of the aircraft (harder than you might think; dead bodies are a PITA to drag, and there’s not much space to work without bumping something that REALLY doesn’t want to be bumped right now). And so there you sit: looking out the big windows at the big world 6 miles below and the wall of high-tech (or low-tech) gizmos arrayed in front of you.
Unlike in the movies no scriptwriter has written your next lines & actions. It’s Show Time and you’ve got 30-90 minutes of inspired ad libbing to do. Don’t fuck up; we’re all counting on you. As are about 1500 next of kin, plus whoever you kill on the ground. And their kin. Film at 11.
^ Great post.
Absofreakin’lutely.
So this was not a documentary?
It’s a good thing he doesn’t know how much I hate his guts.
Great post thanks LSLGuy, you really captured how flying a jet can be incredibly demanding despite the fact the physical manipulation of the autopilot is straight forward.
Yes my flying is all regional jet stuff. The longest sector for our base is about 1:40 take off to landing*, the others are around an hour and we have one that is 20 minutes. A lot of the time we are starting engines with a total of two hours fuel. Time and speed would be among the biggest problems facing the hero.
*This feels like an absolute eternity to me, I have no idea how long haul pilots cope.
I just want to point out that just about anything that takes out both pilots is not going to leave the plane on autopilot and flying level. At best, when or if you get into the cockpit all there is going to is alarm bells, flashing lights, a dis embodied voice saying “pull up, pull up” and a windscreen view of the Earth approaching at 500+kts.
Not going to stop me from trying but the lottery odds are probably better.
30,000ft/9000m to the ground can be covered in a remarkably short time.
Capt
nm