There are things you see in movies and TV shows that you don’t believe can happen in real life. This is one of them.
Imagine being on a plane, and then your pilot has a medical emergency and there’s no-one else to land the plane. What would you do?
Well, that’s exactly what happened. A regular passenger with no apparent flying experience managed to land a small plane in Florida on Tuesday after the plane’s pilot became “incoherent” following a medical emergency.
“I’ve got a serious situation here,” the passenger can be heard told Air Traffic Control. According to CNN the man told the air traffic control (ATC) that he has “no idea” how to fly a plane and explained that the pilot had suffered a medical emergency and was incoherent.
Robert Morgan, a certified flight instructor and an Air Traffic Controller was on a break when the call came in. According to him, he was reading a book during his break when his co-worker yelled, “There’s a passenger flying a plane that’s not a pilot and the pilot is incapacitated so they said you need to help them try and land the plane.”
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Even though he had never flown that particular plane, a Cessna Grand Caravan, he said “I knew the plane was flying like any other plane, I just knew I had to keep him calm, point him to the runway and tell him how to reduce the power so he could descend to land.”
He got a picture of the plane’s cockpit and used that to understand what the passenger was working with. “Alright, we are going to get you to a runway, what do you see now?”. “Before I knew it, he said, ‘I’m on the ground, how do I turn this thing off?” He added.
Kudos to the passenger of N333LD who safely executed an emergency landing at PBI yesterday – well done! And to the CFI controller who talked him down – wow!
— LiveATC.net (@liveatc) May 11, 2022
