It’s the type of story they make movies about. Something happens to a pilot and a passenger steps up and lands a plane. But it actually happened. Yesterday. In Florida.
Granted, it was a small plane and probably much easier to control then your average jet full of people, but still, it’s pretty impressive.
Apparently, something happened to the pilot. Possibly a medical emergency, but no one has said for sure yet. All that is known is that he was somehow incapacitated.
It was a that point that Air Traffic Control heard from one of the passengers on the small plane. He wasn’t even sure where he was, but he did know he needed help, so he simply put on a headset and jumped into one of the front seats. Air Traffic Control picked him up on radar, figured out where he was and helped guide him to an airport, where they talked him through landing the plane. The person who managed to land the plane had absolutely no flying experience. None. Maybe he had been in a plane a few times, but he had never flown one.
Some of us may have tried this on a simulator. Not hard to find a flight simulator for your computer or game system these days. But flight simulators have one huge advantage over the real things. They usually have a reset button. If something bad happens, you can just start all over again.
There is no reset button when you’re flying a real plane.
Other pilots were also impressed when they found out. It’s not something that happens very often. You probably hope it doesn’t happen at all. This time, it turned out okay. The plane ended up safely on the ground.
I’d like to think I could pull this off if a had too, but I’m not sure I could. And I really hope I never have to put my nerves to the test in such a situation.
I’m much better with a reset button.
