Can an Ordinary Passenger Land a Plane? | Airline Pilot Explains

can an ordinary untrained person land a plane definitely well kind of I'll explain it all coming up hey seven four crew welcome back if you don't know me my name is Kelsey I'm a 747 pilot my channel seven fourth year is all about aviation today I'm here in downtown Seattle Washington it's probably one of the last time I'm gonna be filming here for a while because I'm changing my face and this is a view from my hotel room when I was going out to my very first exam as a pilot and it's known as a private pilot checkride when I was going out for that the examiner said to me you know one day you're gonna be flying big planes and they're a lot easier to fly than the Cessna and I thought it seemed a little bit unfair that I had to start with something so hard and that my life was gonna get easier but if you're a passenger and you need to land a plane that's good news in this video I'm gonna give you three different scenarios from best case scenario to worst case scenario and at the end I'm gonna give you three pointers that are very important to remember let's get into it so the best case scenario actually is that you end up on a very large aircraft like a 747 or any of these right here and the reason is that those aircraft that we're flying on have some of the most automation on them which is going to be helpful for you to land this aircraft and if you end up landing an aircraft with four or five hundred people on it people are gonna think you're probably one of the coolest people on earth and you're gonna be an aviation hero without ever taking a flight lesson the reason why those larger aircraft are going to be easier for you is because they have something called Auto land the auto land feature allows for the plane to actually land and stop itself assuming you punch in all the right things into the computer I can do that I joked that the manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus know at this stage in our career were very laziest pilots and so they give us all kinds of things so we have to do as little work as possible but reality it's for situations like very low visibility where a pilot would have a hard time being able to see and safely land on the runway but with this automation we're able to reduce the required visibility of the pilot because the plane is able to safely land on the runway by itself and I could honestly take just about any of you watching this video right now and give you the sequence in which buttons you need to push and win and you'd be able to safely land a 747 in the middle of the runway and have it stopped pick me pick me and they would actually be a pretty smooth landing the hardest part would be taxing the aircraft at that point you would probably just shut down the engines and the fire teams would show up and get everybody off the plane but you'd be able to safely land that aircraft that is the best-case scenario the next best case scenario is that you're on an aircraft like one of these for example the CRJ is an aircraft that I have a bunch of time flying now these aircraft don't have auto land so they can't land in the middle of the runway and stop for you but they can get you pretty low to the ground technically the pilots have to click the autopilot off at 2 or 300 feet but if I were you in a scenario with very little or almost no training what I would do is take that plane to about 50 feet the reason is that gives you less room to mess it up and the reality is is your landing is going to be hard and suck pretty much no matter what you do and the autopilot on the plane is going to tell you when you're at 50 feet so as you come in and you hit 50 feet you'd obviously be prepared to disconnect the autopilot and as that system counts down from 50 to 10 it's gonna count down every 10 feet when you hear something about 20 or 30 you're gonna want to pull back just to get the nose to come up a little bit and if you're looking out the front of the window you'll see the horizon come up a little bit that's all you're gonna want to do just pull up a little bit pull the power all the way back and that's it let it just come down you're gonna want to lock your hand right there let it just come down and hit the runway you're not gonna do anything and put except put your feet on the brake and then stop the aircraft that's it yeah it's just that easy after that all you're gonna do is come out of flight deck and everyone's gonna be cheering and you're gonna give em a little dead now the worst-case scenario is if you ended up on a small aircraft like a Cessna which has no autopilot and no features to help you let's say you were going on a sightseeing tour and the pilot had a heart attack in that scenario you're gonna have no autopilot and nothing to help you land so that is gonna be honestly the trickiest one for you to fly because you're going to actually have to fly the aircraft you came prepared and you brought your parachute then I would definitely put that on and jump out of the plane but if you did not do that the thing that's important to remember is that there are people who have limited or very little experience that have been able to fly and land one of these planes themselves in the right configuration for landing this plane is going to be going pretty slow maybe 60 to 70 miles per hour so at that speed it's gonna be something like a bad car accident but you can definitely survive it if you do the right things so what are the three most important things to remember if you end up in this very very unlikely situation one you need to dial the frequency and that frequency that you need to remember is one to one decimal five you're gonna have to figure out how to get it on the right radio because there are multiple radios usually in a lot of these aircraft so you're gonna want to figure out how to dial 121.5 in the plane that you're in and start talking there's going to be somebody that's listening to that frequency we call it guard but on that frequency you're gonna talk and people are gonna be listening other aircraft like an airline pilot like me would be listening you're also gonna have air traffic control listening to that frequency it's a safety frequency that everybody's listening to all over the world so once you dial up that frequency you're going to want to talk and listen for someone to talk back to you tell me either the name of the flight that you're on or the number of the plane or something so they know who you are and what aircraft it is that you're flying now let's say both the pilots died and you were the only one on there if you were explaining that situation what's gonna happen is air traffic control is going to get someone who's trained and flying Boeing aircraft to get on the radio with you and walk you through exactly what you need to do to safely bring the plane around and engage the auto land features to have it come in and land safely the second thing to remember is the likelihood of this happening is a lot less likely than winning if you're on a commercial aircraft the pilots have to do a six or 12-month physical exam to verify that they're in good health and there's two pilots up there for a reason so the likelihood of both of them dying and you getting up there and having to fly the plane is very very unlikely and the third most important thing to remember and I can't stress this enough is you were never out of the fight you may have remembered one of the first hollywood versus reality videos that I did on the movie flight and one of the things that I really did like about that movie is that Denzel is never out of the fight and he's always trying something to get the aircraft to land safely now of course he's an experienced pilot so it's a little bit different but that's a very important thing to remember if you've never seen the Hollywood versus reality that I did on flight with Denzel Washington I'll put a link to it right here I look forward to hearing from you until then keep the blue side up

Channel: 74 Gear

Views: 1,020,820

Keywords: pilot, airline pilot, 747 pilot, 74 gear, can ordinary person land plane, landing plane, emergency landing, flight emergency, plane landing, pilot dies in flight, what if pilot dies, passenger lands plane, can flight attendant fly the plane, scared of flying, in-flight emergency, emergency on a plane

Id: 5xCiKG4X310

Length: 7min 6sec (426 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020