Passenger with No Flight Experience Lands Plane After Pilot Becomes ‘Incoherent’

[TheTexan]

Do not underestimate the ability to verify your orientation in psychology. Trust me, I've been around clouds with no artificial horizon. We only had to dive through the cloud layer with full speed brakes on, but after a couple of seconds already, you've completely lost your orientation. Having an instrument but a lack of ability to read it, would not make things much better I imagine.

As long as he knows how to read the attitude indicator he's fine.

Also, navigation in airplanes does not work like the navigation in your car. It also takes time to relay information from the tower to the 'new' pilot and time to understand what is happening... If confusion occurs at some point, problems will start to compound. If you're a trained pilot, you know the priorities pretty well, as a novice, supported by radio, who knows where the attention may go.

I don't think you understand how efficient it is to guide over radio. ATC is using radar enabled precision instruments to provide very simple instructions to the pilot.

It's exactly the same as IFR. Except instead of reading the instruments, the ATC is reading it for you. It is more efficient than old-school IFR. (less efficient than autopilot but not significantly, in terms of timing, precision)

ATC does radar assisted landings thousands of times a day. They do it because it makes things stupid easy for the pilot. (With complex rules on their side for avoiding collisions)

Modern aviation is designed to be stupid easy for the pilots as much as possible.

Or you would see a lot more accidents.

 

[Occam's Banana]

This is for a Boeing 737-800 passenger jet, not a dinky little Cessna turboprop, but still relevant and interesting.

How YOU can land a passenger aircraft! 12 steps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePDl1JNqjpM

 

[pcosmar]

I think the VFR part is what made it possible or at least much more likely to succeed. How much interest did this person have in flying or airplanes ?

I am sure they had great interest in Not Crashing an airplane.