Talk about a stressful situation! On Tuesday, May 10, there was a possible medical emergency for a pilot a small private plane. This necessitated the passenger aboard to bring the craft down – even though he had no idea what he was doing.
Passenger Lands Plane With No Idea How to Fly
It was just the passenger and the pilot of the Cessna 208 as they were over the water flying in from the Bahamas. According to the logs and audio, the passenger said “I’ve got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.” The controller responded to ask the position of the aircraft and the passenger replied, “I have no idea. I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”
One of the flight controllers in the tower was a flight instructor and, according to the news report, “printed out a layout of the cockpit and used it to guide the passenger through the steps of flying and landing the plane.”
The recordings also showed that the passenger didn’t even knew how to turn on the navigation screen. There was a JetBlue pilot who was holding while the passenger landed the plane and he said that he couldn’t believe that the passenger was able to land the plane, having to recover from the dive and then stabilize it before landing. He said, “The level of difficulty that this person had to deal with in terms of having zero flight time to fly and land a single-engine turbine aircraft is absolutely incredible.”
After landing, the pilot was taken to a local hospital. I am not sure whether this incident will make the unidentified passenger want to take lessons or never want to after this experience. Kudos to him and the controllers for making a safe landing happen.
Check out WPBF for more details and videos.
Featured image is a stock photo of a Cessna 208 and not the actual aircraft involved in the incident.
That passenger did a pretty good job with that actually. I’ve seen student pilots taking flight lessons, and even licensed pilots do worse landings.